By common critical procedure, Jean Renoir’s late-career Le caporal épinglé, because it is about two French soldiers who keep trying to escape a wartime German prison-camp, is complacently clubbed by comparison with Renoir’s La grande illusion a quarter-century earlier. In a sense, Renoir is inviting—daring—the comparison. From Jacques Perret’s 1947 autobiographical novel, Le caporal épinglé […]
Monthly Archives: March 2011
Martin Scorsese deems Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise, about the French Revolution in its early phase, “one of the finest and richest historical films ever made.” It provides views of the unfolding events by both common folk and royals; the system in place thinks so little of an ordinary man’s life that if he should kill […]
Because Melvin Bush mistakenly believed his appointment as justice of the peace began immediately, a few years later six wedded couples—this includes one that’s entirely offscreen—learn that their marriages, illegal, are instantly annulled. Consequences abound. For instance, Willie Reynolds (Eddie Bracken, at his best), a draftee, goes AWOL before shipping overseas so he can remarry […]
Surely I do not need to prove to anyone my love for the cinema of German writer-director Wim Wenders; thrice I have named Wenders the year’s best—twice for his contribution to scripts and once for the year’s best film. In the Course of Time (1976) is indeed one of the greatest films on Earth and […]
Orson Welles, referring to Shoeshine (1946), expressed great admiration: “the camera disappeared, the screen disappeared; it was just life.” Few of us today would describe the effect of watching Vittorio De Sica’s film in quite this way, but Welles’s words might better suit Cătălin Mitulescu’s first feature, Cum mi-am petrecut sfârsitul lumii, from Romania and […]
Dennis Grunes 