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Geneviève Page, the alluring French actress who starred in such films as Belle de Jour, El Cid and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, died Friday. She was 97.

Page died at her home in Paris, her granddaughter, actress Zoé Guillemaud, told the Afp news agency.

In a career of more than 50 years, Page appeared in other notable films including Fanfan la Tulip (1952); Foreign Intrigue (1956), opposite Robert Mitchum; The Silken Affair (1956), with David Niven; John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966); Mayerling (1968), directed by Terence Young; and Charles Vidor’s Song Without End (1960), where the director died mid-shoot and was replaced by George Cukor.

In 1967, Spanish director Luis Buñuel cast Page as Madame Anais, the owner and operator of the high-class brothel in Belle de Jour, an adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s 1928 novel.

The film centers on Severine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), whose sexless marriage pushes her into prostitution — but only between the hours of 2 and 5 p.

Micheline Presle, the French actress whose controversial Devil in the Flesh role was the start of a career that included starring opposite John Garfield, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn and Paul Newman, has died at 101.

Presle died Wednesday in the Paris suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne, her son-in-law, Olivier Bomsel, told Le Figaro.

Presle portrayed a nurse having an affair with a student (Gérard Philipe) in the World War I drama Devil in the Flesh (1947), which the National Board of Review voted as one of the 10 best films of the year.

She was soon signed by 20th Century Fox, which changed her surname to Prelle and cast her as a café owner who falls in love with a crooked jockey (Garfield) in Jean Negulesco’s Under My Skin (1950). She also starred with Power in the Technicolor war film American Guerilla in the Philippines (1950), and in The Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951).

She would appear...

Micheline Presle, the standout French actress who starred in the controversial Devil in the Flesh before making a foray into Hollywood that included roles opposite John Garfield, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn and Paul Newman, has died. She was 101.

Presle died Wedneday in the Paris suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne, her son-in-law Olivier Bomsel told Le Figaro.

Presle came to international attention when she portrayed a nurse having an affair with a student (Gérard Philipe) in the World War I drama Devil in the Flesh (1947), which the National Board of Review voted as one of the 10 best films of the year.

Because it featured a woman who took a lover while her husband was away at war, it generated a great deal of discussion.

In 1949, Presle met American actor William Marshall, who had been married to another French star, Michèle Morgan, and followed him to America. They would wed that year in Santa Barbara.

Los Angeles, Jan 16 (Ians) Gina Lollobrigida, the 1950s Italian bombshell who starred in films including ‘Fanfan la Tulipe’, ‘Beat the Devil’, ‘Trapeze’ and ‘Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell’, has died. She was 95.

A generation of Indians will remember Lollobrigida from her sensational appearance at the 1978 International Film Festival of India (Iffi), where her flirty exchanges with Kabir Bedi were grist for the gossip magazine mill as well as politically incorrect comparisons between her physical attributes and those of Zeenat Aman.

Kabir Bedi, in his autobiography ‘Stories I Must Tell’, recalls a famous face-off Praveen Babi had with Lollobrigida at a party the Italian actress hosted in his honour for playing Sandokan in the famous Italian television series. The temperamental Indian actress was upset with Lollobrigida because she was apparently getting too comfortable with Bedi.

Lollobrigida also provided fodder for film magazines when it was rumoured that she was being cast by...

Gina Lollobrigida, the 1950s Italian bombshell who starred in films including ‘Fanfan la Tulipe’, ‘Beat the Devil’, ‘Trapeze’ and ‘Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell’, has died. She was 95. A generation of Indians will remember Lollobrigida from her sensational appearance at the 1978 International Film Festival of India (Iffi), where her flirty exchanges with Kabir Bedi were grist for the gossip magazine mill as well as politically incorrect comparisons between her physical attributes and those of Zeenat Aman.

Kabir Bedi, in his autobiography ‘Stories I Must Tell’, recalls a famous face-off Praveen Babi had with Lollobrigida at a party the Italian actress hosted in his honour for playing Sandokan in the famous Italian television series. The temperamental Indian actress was upset with Lollobrigida because she was apparently getting too comfortable with Bedi.

Lollobrigida also provided fodder for film magazines when it was rumoured that she was being cast by Krishna Shah in his Indo-American movie,...

Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, who was one of the world’s most famous actresses enjoying success in Europe and Hollywood in her 1950s and ’60s heyday, has died in Rome at the age of 95.

Related Story Sophia Loren Remembers Longtime Rival Gina Lollobrigida Related Story Chris Ledesma Dies: 'The Simpsons' Longtime Music Editor Was 64 Related Story Jeremiah Green Dies: Modest Mouse Cofounder And Drummer Was 45

Tributes poured in for the actress from across Italy and the world.

“In the immediate period after the war and throughout the 1950s there was one face that represented Italian beauty in the eyes of the world and it was that of Gina Lollobrigida,” wrote the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera in a tribute article.

Related: Hollywood & Media Deaths In 2023: Photo Gallery & Obituaries

“More than (Sophia) Loren, but also more than (Lucia) Bosè, (Gianna Maria) Canale, (Silvana) Mangano or (Silvana) Pampanini,” continued the article,...

Gina Lollobrigida, the 1950s Italian bombshell who starred in films including “Fanfan la Tulipe,” “Beat the Devil,” “Trapeze” and “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” has died. She was 95.

According to Italian news agency Lapresse, Lollobrigida died in a clinic in Rome. No cause of death has been cited. In September she had had surgery to repair a thigh bone broken in a fall, but she recovered and competed for a Senate seat in Italy’s elections held last year in September, though she did not win.

After resisting Howard Hughes’ offer to make movies in Hollywood in 1950, Lollobrigida starred with Gerard Philipe in the 1952 French swashbuckler “Fanfan la Tulipe,” a fest winner and popular favorite.

Her first American movie, shot in Italy, was John Huston’s 1953 film noir spoof “Beat the Devil,” in which she starred with Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones. The same year she starred with Vittorio De Sica in Luigi Comencini’s “Bread,...

Jean-Louis Trintignant, the thoughtful French actor who headlined such art house classics as A Man and a Woman, My Night at Maud’s, The Conformist, Three Colors: Red and Amour, has died. He was 91.

Trintignant died Friday at his home in the Gard region of southern France, his wife, Marianne, and agent told the Agence France-Presse.

Trintignant received a number of accolades throughout his 60-plus-year career, including the best actor prize from Cannes in 1969 for Costa-Gavras’ political thriller Z and a Cesar Award in 2013 for Michael Haneke’s Amour, which also won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.

With more than 130 screen and 50-plus stage credits to his name, Trintignant was a highly prolific and respected talent who could perform anything from Shakespeare to commercial French comedies, from art house favorites by Bertolucci, Kieślowski and Truffaut to popular romances and sci-fi flicks — as...

The Cannes Film Festival has set its lineup for this year’s Cannes Classics program, which shines a spotlight on restorations of classic movies and features contemporary documentaries about film. Kicking off the sidebar is Jean Eustache’s controversial film The Mother and the Whore, the 1973 Cannes Grand Prize winner which incited riots at the time. Also included in the program are films by Vittorio de Sica (Sciuscià), Satyajit Ray (The Adversary), Orson Welles (The Trial) and Martin Scorsese (The Last Waltz), as well as a new 4K master of Singin’ in the Rain to mark the movie’s 70th anniversary.

Among the documentaries is Ethan Hawke’s study of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, The Last Movie Stars. Executive produced by Scorsese, it features Karen Allen, George Clooney, Oscar Isaac, Latanya Richardson Jackson, Zoe Kazan, Laura Linney and Sam Rockwell among others in an exploration of the iconic couple and American cinema.

This year’s line-up will also celebrate classics such as Singin’ In The Rain and Indian director Satyajit Ray’s 1970 work The Adversary.

Late French filmmaker Jean Eustache’s recently restored cult 1973 drama The Mother And The Whore will open Cannes Classics this year, the line-up for which was announced on Monday (May 2).

Other highlights include two episodes of the series The Last Movie Stars directed by Ethan Hawke about Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman; a screening of Singin’ In The Rain to coincide with the 70th anniversary of its release and a restored 4K version of Vittorio de Sica’s 1946 work Sciuscià.

Luis Buñuel's most direct film about revolutionary politics brandishes few if any surreal touches in its clash between French star Gérard Philipe and the Mexican legend María Félix. Borrowing the climax of the opera Tosca, it's an intelligent study of how not to effect change in a corrupt political regime. La fièvre monte à El Pao Region A+B Blu-ray + Pal DVD Pathé (Fr) 1959 / B&W / 1:37 flat (should be 1:66 widescreen) / 96 min. / Los Ambiciosos; "Fever Mounts at El Pao" / Street Date December 4, 2013 / available at Amazon France / Eur 26,27 Starring Gérard Philipe, María Félix, Jean Servais, M.A. Soler, Raúl Dantés, Domingo Soler, Víctor Junco, Roberto Cañedo, Enrique Lucero, Pilar Pellicer, David Reynoso, Andrés Soler. Cinematography Gabriel Figueroa Assistant Director Juan Luis Buñuel Original Music Paul Misraki Written by Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza, Charles Dorat, Louis Sapin from a novel by Henri Castillou Produced by Jacques Bar, Óscar Dancigers, Gregorio Walerstein...

Danièle Delorme and Jean Gabin in 'Deadlier Than the Male.' Danièle Delorme movies (See previous post: “Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 Actress Became Rare Woman Director's Muse.”) “Every actor would like to make a movie with Charles Chaplin or René Clair,” Danièle Delorme explains in the filmed interview (ca. 1960) embedded further below, adding that oftentimes it wasn't up to them to decide with whom they would get to work. Yet, although frequently beyond her control, Delorme managed to collaborate with a number of major (mostly French) filmmakers throughout her six-decade movie career. Aside from her Jacqueline Audry films discussed in the previous Danièle Delorme article, below are a few of her most notable efforts – usually playing naive-looking young women of modest means and deceptively inconspicuous sexuality, whose inner character may or may not match their external appearance. Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (“Open for Inventory Causes,” 1946), an unreleased, no-budget comedy notable...

Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress and pioneering female film producer. Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress was pioneering woman producer, politically minded 'femme engagée' Danièle Delorme, who died on Oct. 17, '15, at the age of 89 in Paris, is best remembered as the first actress to incarnate Colette's teenage courtesan-to-be Gigi and for playing Jean Rochefort's about-to-be-cuckolded wife in the international box office hit Pardon Mon Affaire. Yet few are aware that Delorme was featured in nearly 60 films – three of which, including Gigi, directed by France's sole major woman filmmaker of the '40s and '50s – in addition to more than 20 stage plays and a dozen television productions in a show business career spanning seven decades. Even fewer realize that Delorme was also a pioneering woman film producer, working in that capacity for more than half a century. Or that she was what in French is called a femme engagée...

Glenda Jackson: Actress and former Labour MP. Two-time Oscar winner and former Labour MP Glenda Jackson returns to acting Two-time Best Actress Academy Award winner Glenda Jackson set aside her acting career after becoming a Labour Party MP in 1992. Four years ago, Jackson, who represented the Greater London constituency of Hampstead and Highgate, announced that she would stand down the 2015 general election – which, somewhat controversially, was won by right-wing prime minister David Cameron's Conservative party.[1] The silver lining: following a two-decade-plus break, Glenda Jackson is returning to acting. Now, Jackson isn't – for the time being – returning to acting in front of the camera. The 79-year-old is to be featured in the Radio 4 series Emile Zola: Blood, Sex and Money, described on their website as a “mash-up” adaptation of 20 Emile Zola novels collectively known as "Les Rougon-Macquart."[2] Part 1 of the three-part Radio 4 series will be broadcast daily during an...

Marc Allégret: From André Gide lover to Simone Simon mentor (photo: Marc Allégret) (See previous post: "Simone Simon Remembered: Sex Kitten and Femme Fatale.") Simone Simon became a film star following the international critical and financial success of the 1934 romantic drama Lac aux Dames, directed by her self-appointed mentor – and alleged lover – Marc Allégret.[1] The son of an evangelical missionary, Marc Allégret (born on December 22, 1900, in Basel, Switzerland) was to have become a lawyer. At age 16, his life took a different path as a result of his romantic involvement – and elopement to London – with his mentor and later "adoptive uncle" André Gide (1947 Nobel Prize winner in Literature), more than 30 years his senior and married to Madeleine Rondeaux for more than two decades. In various forms – including a threesome with painter Théo Van Rysselberghe's daughter Elisabeth – the Allégret-Gide relationship remained steady until the late '20s and their trip to...

Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...

Translators introduction: This article by Mireille Latil Le Dantec, the first of two parts, was originally published in issue 40 of Cinématographe, September 1978. The previous issue of the magazine had included a dossier on "La qualité française" and a book of a never-shot script by Jean Grémillon (Le Printemps de la Liberté or The Spring of Freedom) had recently been published. The time was ripe for a re-evaluation of Grémillon's films and a resuscitation of his undervalued career. As this re-evaluation appears to still be happening nearly 40 years later—Grémillon's films have only recently seen DVD releases and a 35mm retrospective begins this week at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens—this article and its follow-up gives us an important view of a French perspective on Grémillon's work by a very perceptive critic doing the initial heavy-lifting in bringing the proper attention to the filmmaker's work.

Filmmaker maudit?...

Danielle Darrieux turns 97: Darrieux has probably enjoyed the longest film star career in history (photo: Danielle Darrieux in ‘La Ronde’) Screen legend Danielle Darrieux is turning 97 today, May 1, 2014. In all likelihood, the Bordeaux-born (1917) Darrieux has enjoyed the longest "movie star" career ever: eight decades, from Wilhelm Thiele’s Le Bal (1931) to Denys Granier-Deferre’s The Wedding Cake / Pièce montée (2010). (Mickey Rooney has had a longer film career — nearly nine decades — but mostly as a supporting player in minor roles.) Absurdly, despite a prestigious career consisting of more than 100 movie roles, Danielle Darrieux — delightful in Club de femmes, superb in The Earrings of Madame De…, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking in 8 Women — has never won an Honorary Oscar. But then again, very few women have. At least, the French Academy did award her an Honorary César back in 1985; additionally, in 2002 Darrieux and her fellow 8 Women / 8 femmes co-stars shared Best Actress honors...

Oscar-winning British cinematographer who worked on a wide range of film classics

The Oscar-winning British cinematographer Oswald Morris, who has died aged 98, will be remembered for many classics, including Moulin Rouge, Fiddler on the Roof, Moby Dick and Lolita. He worked with some of the great directors, John Huston, Sidney Lumet, Carol Reed, Stanley Kubrick and Franco Zeffirelli. Many of Morris's films are landmarks in the history of colour cinematography. For Moulin Rouge (1952) he used filters to create a style reminiscent of paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec. For Fiddler on the Roof (1971), which won him an Oscar, he filmed with a silk stocking over the lens to give a sepia effect.

Morris also shot popular favourites such as The Guns of Navarone (1961), Oliver! (1968), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) and The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and photographed acting luminaries: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Gregory Peck and Humphrey Bogart.

The bloodless Cahiers du cinéma wars induced a vague but hugely influential criterion for what was to be considered good and bad in film. Elaborate sets, one of French cinema’s major traits that, in certain genres, could compete with Hollywood, were deemed stifling and were rejected in favor of urban spaces and real locations.

The infamy that Cahiers du cinéma’s critical bombardment brought to certain filmmakers, at least among a small circle of cinephiles, took years to reverse. While Cahiers du cinéma happened to be more generous to American cinema, fewer French directors were allowed to enter their cannon. If, for instance, one Robert Bresson did, otherwise many Jean Delannoys did not. While the art of some great filmmakers was acknowledged and they were given the throne, many others, who were less stylistically consistent, fell into oblivion.

Today, more than half a century after the Cahiers wars, and regardless of their accomplishments,...

Chicago – There are a few major comedies on New Releases shelves this week along with some interesting, smaller films and one of the most anticipated TV shows of 2013. What options are new in the world of Blu-ray, DVD, streaming and digital TV providers? Some of the most interesting and most unbearable comeedies of the year hit your home viewing radar. Here’s how to rank them from ha-ha to hateful.

The Heat

Photo credit: Fox

“The Heat”

Paul Feig’s mega-comedy proved that star power can go a long way in overcoming the relative shortcomings of a pretty mediocre script. There’s nothing really special about “The Heat” on paper but when you put the incredibly likable Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy (two of the most popular actresses in the world right now when one considers that both this and their other 2013 films — “Gravity” and “Identity Thief” — broke $100 million domestically) in front of the camera,...

Introduction

In Laissez-passer [Safe Conduct], the film that the French director Bertrand Tavernier made in 2002, we see the French film industry of the Occupation years as a ruined and almost shut-down institution that is highly dependent on the factor of chance. In his story, Tavernier exculpates one of the key figures of the occupation cinema, Henri-Georges Clouzot, from the accusation of collaborating with the Nazis. He pictures Clouzot as a man whose Jewish wife has been held hostage by the Nazis and, and against all odds, he finishes Le corbeau about the vicious and nasty people of a small town in France, where someone is sending poison pen letters to its "honourable" citizens. Le corbeau became a very popular box-office hit during the Occupation, and, at the same time, the underground press attacked it for showing France as a land of the degenerate and perverted people, a view that, according to accusers,...

Mathieu Amalric is set to take the helm of the big screen adaptation of The Red and the Black written by Stendhal. Variety reports that Amalric is reteaming with Les Films du Poisson's Yael Fogiel and Laetitia Gonzalez for the film which tells of an ambitious young teacher whose liaison with a married, wealthy woman, ends up leading to his downfall. This is the second time The Red and the Black has been made into a movie; the last was 1954's Claude Autant-Lara pic Rouge et noir, starring Gérard Philipe, Daniellle Darrieux, Antonella Lauldi and Jean Mercure. Amalric is busy on the script at this point. The actor and director has an abundance of acting credits since 1985 including more recently David Cronenberg's upcoming Cosmopolis starring Robert Pattinson, and prior to that James Bond pic Quantum of Solace...

Mathieu Amalric is set to take the helm of the big screen adaptation of The Red and the Black written by Stendhal. Variety reports that Amalric is reteaming with Les Films du Poisson's Yael Fogiel and Laetitia Gonzalez for the film which tells of an ambitious young teacher whose liaison with a married, wealthy woman, ends up leading to his downfall. This is the second time The Red and the Black has been made into a movie; the last was 1954's Claude Autant-Lara pic Rouge et noir, starring Gérard Philipe, Daniellle Darrieux, Antonella Lauldi and Jean Mercure. Amalric is busy on the script at this point. The actor and director has an abundance of acting credits since 1985 including more recently David Cronenberg's upcoming Cosmopolis starring Robert Pattinson, and prior to that James Bond pic Quantum of Solace...

51 years ago today, on April 19th 1961, Federico Fellini's masterpiece "La Dolce Vita" arrived in U.S. theaters. The film was already a phenomenon; it had premiered in Italy the previous February, was instantly condemned by the Catholic Church (it was banned entirely in Spain until 1975), and won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960. On its U.S. release, it was widely acclaimed by critics, became a huge box office hit, and picked up four Oscar nominations the following year, including director and screenplay, and won for costume design.

To mark the anniversary of the much copied, but never equalled film which follows a journalist, played by Marcello Mastroianni over the course of a tumultous week in Rome, we've assembled a selection of five pieces of info that even the biggest Fellini fans might not be aware of. Check them out below.

1. Paul Newman and Henry Fonda were considered for roles.

Yves Allégret is part of that generation of French filmmakers it's no longer safe to ignore, despite their dismissal by Cahiers du Cinema. Continuing the melancholy strains of poetic realism into the post-war environment, Allegret creates, in his best work, a pervasive feeling of despair that's redeemed by a certain romanticism. In other words, he charts the terrain of depression without actually being depressing.

Une si Jolie Petite Plage (Such a Pretty Little Beach, 1949) stars Gérard Philipe as a young man somewhat lethargically on the run after killing the wealthy older chanteuse who had been keeping him (the film is oddly uninterested in the motives that led to this murder, and nobody except the police seem to think any the less of him for it. Curious and slightly sinister). 

For his hideout, Philipe chooses, with fatalistic perversity, the seaside hotel where he first met his eventual victim, where he simply checks in and awaits developments,...

Over at Shadowplay, I'm hosting a little blogathon on "late films," but it was coincidence that found me screening a fan-subtitled, from-vhs copy of Les amants de Montparnasse (a.k.a. Montparnasse 19), which isn't anybody's last film, exactly, but is a late one in all kinds of ways. Both star Gérard Philipe and director Jacques Becker would be dead within a couple of years, both much too young (Becker went out on the high note of Le trou, while Philipe crammed a further four films into his schedule, including Roger Vadim's Les liaisons dangereuses and Luis Buñuel's Fever Mounts at El Pao). The film itself was the last project planned by Max Ophüls, who died before he could make it. His version would have starred Yves Montand as Modigliani and the actor's real-life wife, Simone Signoret, as Jeanne Hébuterne, his long-suffering partner. Given Signoret's own struggles as partner to the faithless Montand,...

Monsieur Ripois (1954), directed by René Clément, is a rather wonderful and sophisticated drama/character study which deposits scheming philanderer Gérard Philipe into the heart of austerity-era England, where he ruthlessly hoovers up all the stray birds who are hanging around waiting for London to start swinging. The story unfolds one evening as Ripois has lured his soon-to-be-ex-wife's attractive friend to his flat, and recounts the story of his amorous adventures to her in hopes of proving the sincerity of his affections. But since his story is nothing but a catalogue of lies, seduction, betrayal and headlong flight, it's hard to see whether his cause can be won...

One of the pleasures of this film, a decently budgeted affair nevertheless doused in an air of poverty and gloom endemic to the UK at that time, is that it's a French movie made in Britain. So we get to hear the dashing,...

Playing a historical giant is nothing new to Christopher Plummer. In his decade-spanning career, the Toronto-born actor has taken on the screen personae of Aristotle, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mike Wallace, and Rudyard Kipling. His latest project, The Last Station (read our review), finds the veteran actor starring as Leo Tolstoy, adding another icon to his resume.

In the film, Tolstoy is nearing the end of his life, and he has left fiction behind. Instead, he is focusing on his philosophical and religious writings, which have turned him into the leader of the Tolstoyan movement. His closest follower, Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), battles with Tolstoy's wife, Sofya (Helen Mirren), for control of the estate. Meanwhile, his new personal secretary, Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy), is caught in between Sofya and Chertkov, as he tries to reconcile the proscribed chastity of the Tolstoyan philosophy with the beauty (Kerry Condon) he meets at his commune.

The 1952 French smash Fanfan La Tulipe introduces its wandering rogue protagonist Fanfan (Gérard Philipe) in the middle of what seems to be a typical day. Having "tumbled" a farmer's daughter in the middle of the afternoon, he's caught in a post-coital nap by the farmer and a small mob. Sensing charm might not be enough to get him out of the situation, he jumps in a nearby river and swims away without a second thought. It doesn't work—the film cuts almost instantly to the crowd attempting to drag a wet Philipe to the altar—but that gesture, the kind signifying a person who believes himself completely free, captures much of what's appealing (and a little suspect) about the film's hero. Directed by the venerable Christian-Jaque, Fanfan La Tulipe plays like an extension of its protagonist's personality. It's so pleased with its own ability to be charming that all...

PARIS -- Gerard Krawczyk's 2003 version of the French classic Fanfan la Tulipe will open this year's Festival de Cannes, organizers said Wednesday. The swashbuckling 18th-century romance features young French star Vincent Perez and Spanish-born Penelope Cruz in the title roles, which were played in the 1952 version by Gerard Philipe and Gina Lollobrigida. The story's title character joins the French army to escape an arranged marriage while trying to win the hand of the king's wife. The film will screen Out of Competition at the 56th edition of Cannes, which runs May 14-25. Big-budget French producer Luc Besson had a strong hand in the film, co-producing with Michel Feller, while his company, EuropaCorp, served as the production entity.