Nicole Garcia played Janine, who is duped out of a love affair by her lover’s lying wife, in Alain Resnais’s Mon oncle d’Amerique (1980). She is also the co-writer (with Jacques Fieschi) and director of a long, tediously involved thriller of sorts, Place Vendôme. Garcia stresses character and mood—in particular, the moody character of Marianne […]
Daily Archives: July 21, 2007
From the 1919 novel by Roland Dorgelès set during the Great War, Raymond Bernard’s Le croix de bois bears comparison with G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 (1930), from Germany. Two things distinguish Bernard’s powerful antiwar film. One is its absence of conventional, detailed narrative; in effect, the war, by disrupting the lives of the combatants, […]
A lavish Technicolor production of the Broadway musical from the previous year, Louisiana Purchase likeably plays off memories of Frank Capra’s melodramatic comedy Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, despite its vaguely fascistic politics a huge hit another year earlier. I understand that the movie, which Irving Cummings directed, pretty much castrates Morrie Ryskind’s play (from […]
Garson Kanin’s comedy Tom, Dick and Harry opens with its only gorgeous shot. In a darkened movie theater, a full house—ordinary American humanity—watch the screen while we hear, along with them, the closing dialogue of a romantic film, something like Tom, Dick and Harry, in which a millionaire marries an ordinary girl. The shaft of […]
Dennis Grunes 