Marie-Octobre

This is one the best movies directed by Julien Duvivier with a perfect french casting : lino ventura, bernard blier, serge reggiani, robert dalban, etc... The script is very good, the acting just perfect and the atmosphere is really great. Well, a perfect french movie don't miss it !

This movie is more like a theater-play: very much talking and hardly any action. All talking is done in French, and deals with a very haunting issue: in 1959 a former French resistance group reunites to search themselves for a traitor who killed one of them back in 1944. In this way a real Agatha Christie-like plot develops, all set in the long dark shadows of World War II and its horrors. Leading female star Danielle Darrieux gives a glittering performance, both in her talking and in her presence. The male cast around her consists of some of the greatest French actors at the time. 'Marie-Octobre' is not an easy movie to watch: you have to concentrate on it. If you do so, you'll be swept along onto its climax and surprising end.

What struck me most about Julien Duvivier's MARIE-OCTOBRE, an Agatha Christie-style mystery about a former resistance leader (Danielle Darrieux) who gathers her old cohorts together to flush out the Judas who betrayed them, was how the plot was set in motion. Fifteen years after the war, Marie runs a fashion house and a German buyer, a former Wehrmacht officer, recognized her and let it slip in casual conversation that one of her own had turned them in back in the day -only he couldn't remember their name. Former enemies striking up an acquaintance many years later and reminiscing about the war "like old friends" doubtless happened to many a Yank and British vet on Continental vacations back in the '50s and '60s but in this instance that betrayal caused the death of Marie's lover. She never married, never forgot, and her insistence on a day of reckoning stood in stark contrast to the near-indifference most of the others exhibited (there was one suspect who kept sneaking away from the investigation to watch wrestling on TV). They all had gotten on with their lives and preferred to let the past stay buried, even a priest.

It's a good idea with an obvious flaw, unfortunately -the entire film takes place in a drawing room and is all talk, talk, talk. MARIE-OCTOBRE positively cries out for flashbacks and if it had only "opened up", it could have been impressive, indeed, and would most likely be much better known today. Still, the movie's got a great "name" cast and the tale itself is quite involving. Recommended.

Based on a novel by Jacques Robert, Julien Duvivier, Henri Jeanson and the author himself, wrote an original script for this film, which actually looks more like a play, as everything happens in the space of a few hours, and almost always in the same room.

The plot, despite focusing on the discovery of a traitor, among the group of old comrades in arms, of the resistance, almost seems like a long scene from Agatha Christie, in which Hercule Poirot unfolds hypothesis after hypothesis, until concluding with the discovery of the murderer.

The main attraction of the film is that it allows us to read between the lines of the police plot, to show a France that is both resistant and collaborative. They are all suspects because, despite being heroes of the resistance, they all collaborated, more or less, with the German invader and the Vichy government. And everyone accuses each other of these civic sins.

It is France settling accounts with history and clearing its guilty conscience of defeat and collaborationism, during the Nazi occupation.

In this sense, it is a provocative work, for its time. But subtly reading.

However, in general, it looks almost like a banal Cluedo game, despite a cast full of stars.

At first sight, a policier. Or adaptation of Agatha Christie novel. Or only a war story. Or a story of revenge.

But each of this definitions works in some measure. It is a film admirable crafted and this represents one of its basic virtues. The second good point, obvious , the cast. Not the last, the atmosphere, constructed crumb by crumb.

After fifteen years , a sort of trial . The members of resistance group looking for the author of murder of one of them. Danielle Darrieux is just superb, proposing a great character in wich past love remains part of desire, cold one, of justice.

A film captivating the viewer as testimony of this special hunt of truth, in which the accusations, doubts, excuses are mixed in a large effort to cure a stain of past.