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Awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival amid much mouth-frothing from the American press over its alleged communist credentials, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic The Wages of Fear now seems much less like a potboiler spin on Salt of the Earth and a lot more like the spiritual godfather to every testosterone-fueled thrill ride since. Time has inevitably eradicated the contemporary circumstance that fed its political reception and modern audiences will surely recognize that the howls of anti-Americanism said more about the accuser than the accused. If anything, The Wages of Fear now registers as the callous post-World War II flipside to Casablanca, in which people have been scattered not only into pockets of nobility, but also outposts of pusillanimity.

If Diabolique was Clouzot’s bid to out-Hitchcock Hitchcock, then The Wages of Fear is a little bit like a Howard Hawks thriller, only without the mitigating presence of women.

After the success of “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” William Friedkin became one of the most in-demand filmmakers in Hollywood. Having the option to choose his own projects, he opted to adapt Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel “The Wages of Fear.” This was the second adaptation of the novel after Henri-Georges Clouzot’s critical darling of the same name, released in 1953, which won both the Golden Bear and the Palme d’Or. While Friedkin admired Clouzot’s work and even dedicated his film “Sorcerer” to Clouzot, the tone and treatment of his film were completely different from the earlier adaptation. In this article, I will discuss the two films and explore how despite being based on the same source material they became two distinct cinematic works.

Clouzot’s film starts in a small town somewhere in Latin America, filled with impoverished foreigners. The most prominent among them are Mario, a...

Netflix has announced a remake of the 1950s French classic The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur), in a production reuniting the platform with action-thriller maestro Julien Leclercq.

Production is currently underway on the untitled film for a scheduled release in 2024.

The 1953 original starred Yves Montand, Peter van Eyck, Charles Vanel and Folco Lulli as four down-on-their-luck men who are hired to drive trucks laden with nitroglycerine through the mountains as part of an operation to extinguish an oil well fire.

The work is regarded as one of the most suspenseful action-thrillers of all time.

Leclercq’s reboot stars Franck Gastambide, best known internationally for his role in Taxi 5, opposite Alban Lenoir (Lost Bullet), Ana Girardot (The House) and Sofiane Zermani (No Limit).

“To reunite this cast for the reboot of such a film, for a worldwide broadcast with Netflix, forces me to put all my heart and guts into it,...

Is there a better way to prove the virtue of the cinematic experience than to get 5,000 people on their feet giving a film a standing ovation?

Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Fremaux did just that on the opening night of his 14th Lumière Film Festival in Lyon with Louis Garrel’s romantic comedy “The Innocent.”

The movie played in the jam-packed Halle Tony Garnier before a star-studded crowd, including Garrel and his cast, Noémie Merlant and Roschdy Zem, as well as Sebastián Lelio, Costa Gavras, Leila Bekhti, Marina Fois, Lee Chang-dong, Nicole Garcia, Sabine Azema and Damien Bonnard.

Industry players also turned up, notably MK2 Films’ co-CEOs Nathanael and Elisha Karmitz, Series Mania’s director Laurence Herszberg, Ad Vitam co-founder Alexandra Henochsberg, the Annecy Film Festival head Mickaël Marin, and “The Innocent” producer, Anne-Dominique Toussaint. The opening night event was held in the city’s historic 5,000-seat Tony Garnier concert...

At a time when heritage cinema is booming – thanks to outstanding progress in conservation standards and a growth in demand – Lyon’s Lumière heritage film festival Lumière is playing a leading role in uncovering long-forgotten cinematic gems.

“Dans la Nuit” (“In the Night”), widely considered one of the last, if not the last major French silent film, is one of them. It is the only film shot by French actor Charles Vanel, perhaps best remembered for his role as a desperate truck driver in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s acclaimed “The Wages of Fear,” which won both the Golden Bear and the Palme d’Or in 1953. Vanel also stars in the film, alongside Russian-French actress Sandra Milovanoff, who became a silent film era casualty as her Slavic accent was considered unsuitable for talkies.

The newly restored version of the film is having its world premiere at the fest, which is headed by Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux.

If Jean-Paul Belmondo had gotten his way, he would have been a stage actor. He applied to the Conservatoire de Paris three times before the illustrious drama school accepted him and spent the 1950s trying to launch a theater career.

Lucky for world cinema, Belmondo had greater success on screen, thanks to his role in 1960’s “Breathless,” the movie that launched the French New Wave — and instantly rendered everything Hollywood had been doing old-fashioned. In “Breathless,” Belmondo wasn’t playing a gangster so much as someone who had seen too many gangster movies, a self-styled tough guy who took Humphrey Bogart as his model. His crime spree feels more improvised than scripted, while his doesn’t-care, screw-society attitude effectively thumbed its nose at all the good reasons on-screen criminals had used to justify their actions before.

Godard’s film made Belmondo the face of the New Wave — a handsome mug...

It’s yet another masterpiece from the Italian director Francesco Rosi, adapting a fiction novel about a political murder conspiracy that is altogether too much of a good fit for the troubled Italy of 1975. Crime star Lino Ventura is the incorruptible detective investigating a series of killings of high-level judges, who begins to intuit that his superiors want the murders to continue. Dark and moody, Rosi’s picture is impeccably directed for a kind of nagging, uneasy suspense, with frightening hints that Ventura is being drawn into a bigger, more sinister frame. With Charles Vanel, Max von Sydow and Fernando Rey, and music by Piero Piccioni. The insightful audio commentary is by Alex Cox. The original Italian title is even more blood-curdling: Cadaveri eccelenti.

Illustrious Corpses

Blu-ray

Kino Classics

1976 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 121 min. / Cadaveri eccellenti; The Context / Street Date September 28, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Lino Ventura, Tino Carraro, Marcel Bozzuffi,...

The saga continues, featuring Adam Rifkin, Robert D. Krzykowski, John Sayles, Maggie Renzi, Mick Garris and Larry Wilmore with special guest star Blaire Bercy from the Hollywood Food Coalition.

Please support the Hollywood Food Coalition. Text “Give” to 323.402.5704 or visit https://hofoco.org/donate!

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Key Largo (1948)

I Don’t Want to Talk About It (1993)

Camila (1984)

I, the Worst of All (1990)

The Wages of Fear (1953)

Le Corbeau (1943)

Diabolique (1955)

Red Beard (1965)

Seven Samurai (1954)

Ikiru (1952)

General Della Rovere (1959)

The Gold of Naples (1959)

Bitter Rice (1949)

Pickup On South Street (1953)

My Darling Clementine (1946)

Viva Zapata! (1952)

Panic In The Streets (1950)

Yellow Sky (1948)

Ace In The Hole (1951)

Wall Street (1987)

Women’s Prison (1955)

True Love (1989)

Mean Streets (1973)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

The Abyss (1989)

The China Syndrome (1979)

Big (1988)

Splash (1984)

The ’Burbs (1989)

Long Strange Trip (2017)

Little Women (2019)

Learning To Skateboard In A War Zone (If You’re A Girl) (2019)

The Guns of Navarone...

Costa-Gavras, who is still making films at 86, was just a beginner when he made Un homme de trop (a.k.a. Shock Troops) in 1967, and arguably wouldn't hit his true stride until he made the Oscar-winning Z a couple of years later. The '67 movie, a French Resistance drama produced by James Bond mogul Harry Saltzman, was a big-budget flop. But it's also a genuine unknown masterpiece.Speculating as to why the film wasn't a hit, the director supposed that maybe there was "too much action." Action, he said, is easy to do. Well, not for most filmmakers, not the way he does it. The movie is simply incredible—the most headlong film I can think of outside of Mad Max: Fury Road. True, there isn't quite as much fighting as all that—it isn't a single chase one way followed by another chase going back (see also Keaton's The...

Finally out on Blu-ray in Region A, Luis Buñuel’s beautiful color adventure is a worthy jungle tale shot through with his signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.” The Spanish surrealist’s filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois; all of his films are political, but three features in the 1950s cast a harsh eye on the subject of revolution itself, with surprising results. With the presence of movie stars Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, this may also be the director’s most commercial feature.

Death in the Garden

Blu-ray

Kino Classics

1956 / Color / 1:37 / 104 min. / Street Date July 23, 2019 / La mort en ce jardin / Available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Mich.le Girardon, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Francisco Reiguera, José Chávez.

Cinematography: Jorge Stahl, Jr.

Film Editors: Denise Charvein,...

Finally out on Blu-ray in Region A, Luis Buñuel’s beautiful color adventure is a worthy jungle tale shot through with his signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.” The Spanish surrealist’s filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois; all of his films are political, but three features in the 1950s cast a harsh eye on the subject of revolution itself, with surprising results. With the presence of movie stars Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, this may also be the director’s most commercial feature.

Death in the Garden

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1956 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 104 min. / Street Date July 23, 2019 / La mort en ce jardin / Available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Mich.le Girardon, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Francisco Reiguera, José Chávez.

Cinematography: Jorge Stahl, Jr.

Film Editors: Denise Charvein,...

Ken Loach will be in attendance to give a masterclass and there will also be tributes to French actor Daniel Auteuil.

France’s Institut Lumière will honour multi-Oscar winning director Francis Ford Coppola with its prestigious Lumière Award at the 11th edition of its classic cinema festival, running Oct 12-20 this year.

Past recipients include Jane Fonda, Wong Kar-wai, Catherine Deneuve, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodovar, Quentin Tarantino, Ken Loach, Gérard Depardieu, Milos Forman and Clint Eastwood.

Thierry Frémaux, who heads up the Lyon-based Institut Lumière alongside his delegate general duties at the Cannes Film Festival, unveiled the choice of Coppola...

Stars: Brigitte Bardot, Sami Frey, Paul Meaurisse, Charles Vanel, Marie-José Nat | Written by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Véra Clouzot, Simone Drieu, Jérôme Géronimi, Michèle Perrein, Christiane Rochefort | Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

A mighty success at the time, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1960 thriller La Vérité was the film to make a serious actor of Brigitte Bardot. A big part of the hype may have been Bardot’s fling with co-star Sami Frey, which led to her attempted suicide just before the film’s release. Clouzot’s heart attack during filming, and the death of his wife not long after, only adds to the film’s grisly impact.

It’s 1959, and a court in Paris convenes to decide the fate of Dominique Marceau (Bardot). She admits to shooting her lover, Gilbert (Frey); but her defence, led by the wearied Guérin (Charles Vanel), are arguing that she was driven to madness by her victim. They’re up against a fearsome prosecutor,...

Brigitte Bardot proved her mettle as a dramatic actress in H.G. Clouzot’s strikingly pro-feminist courtroom epic, that puts the modern age of ‘immoral’ permissiveness on trial. Is Bardot’s selfish, sensation-seeking young lover an oppressed victim? Clouzot makes her the author of her own problems yet doesn’t let her patriarchal inquisitors off the hook.

La vérité

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 960

1960 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen / 128 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date February 12, 2019 / 39.95

Starring: Brigitte Bardot, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel, Sami Frey, Marie-JoséNat, Jean-Loup Reynold, André Oumansky, Claude Berri, Jacques Perrin, Jacques Marin. Fernand Ledoux.

Cinematography: Armand Thirard

Film Editor: Albert Jurgenson

Written by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Simone Drieu, Michèle Perrein, Jérôme Géronimi, Christiane Rochefort, Véra Clouzot

Produced by Raoul Lévy

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

H.G. Clouzot mesmerized audiences with the political outrage of The Wages of Fear and the riveting horror-suspense of Diabolique, but his intellectual,...

Luis Buñuel’s filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois, with a surreal spin. All of his films are political, but three features in the 1950s cast a harsh eye on the subject of revolution itself, with surprising results. This beautiful color show is a worthy jungle adventure tale shot through with Buñuel’s signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.”

Death in the Garden

Region B Blu-ray + DVD

Eureka Entertainment / Masters of Cinema

1956 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 104 min. / Street Date June 19, 2017 / La mort en ce jardin / Available from Amazon UK / £ 11.65

Starring: Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Michèle Girardon, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Francisco Reiguera, José Chávez.

Cinematography: Jorge Stahl, Jr.

Film Editors: Denise Charvein, Marguerite Renoir

Original Music: Paul Misraki

Written by Luis Alcoriza, Luis Buñuel, Raymond Queneau, Gabriel Arout from a novel by José-André Lacour.

Welcome to the world of Jean Grémillon, where adult characters work through adult problems without benefit of melodramatic excess. The impressively directed experiences of Micheline Presle’s lady doctor on a storm-swept island opts for a progressive point of view, not sentimentality.

The Love of a Woman

Blu-ray + DVD

Arrow Video USA

1953 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 104 min. / Street Date August 22, 2017 / L’amour d’une femme / Available from Arrow Video 39.95

Starring: Micheline Presle, Massimo Girotti, Gaby Morlay, Paolo Stoppa, Marc Cassot, Marius David, Yvette Etiévant, Roland Lesaffre, Robert Naly, Madeleine Geoffroy.

Cinematography: Louis Page

Film Editor: Louisette Hautecoeur, Marguerite Renoir

Production Design: Robert Clavel

Original Music: Elsa Barraine, Henrie Dutilleux

Written by René Fallet, Jean Grémillon, René Wheeler

Produced by Mario Gabrielli, Pierre Géin

Directed by Jean Grémillon

Film critics that pride themselves on rediscovering older directors haven’t done very well by France’s Jean Grémillon, at least not in this country.

“I spent a lot of time reviewing the silent films for crowd scenes –the way extras move, evolve, how the space is staged and how the cameras capture it, the views used,” Nolan said earlier this year when it came to the creation of his WWII epic Dunkirk, referencing films such as Intolerance, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, and Greed, as well as the films of Robert Bresson.

Throughout the entire month of July, if you’re in the U.K., you are lucky enough to witness a selection of these influences in a program at BFI Southbank. Featuring all screenings in 35mm or 70mm — including a preview of Dunkirk over a week before it hits theaters — there’s classics such as Greed, Sunrise, and The Wages of Fear, as well as Alien, Speed, and even Tony Scott’s final film.

Check out Nolan’s introduction below, followed by...

Running from 1-31 July, BFI Southbank are delighted to present a season of films which have inspired director Christopher Nolan’s new feature Dunkirk (2017), released in cinemas across the UK on Friday 21 July.

Christopher Nolan Presents has been personally curated by the award-winning director and will offer audiences unique insight into the films which influenced his hotly anticipated take on one of the key moments of WWII.

The season will include a special preview screening of Dunkirk on Thursday 13 July, which will be presented in 70mm and include an introduction from the director himself.

Christopher Nolan is a passionate advocate for the importance of seeing films projected on film, and as one of the few cinemas in the UK that still shows a vast amount of celluloid film, BFI Southbank will screen all the films in the season on 35mm or 70mm.

In 2015 Nolan appeared on stage alongside visual artist...

Franceso Rosi's warm, thoughtful tale sees a family gathering observe grievous modern problems -- after so much violence in Italian politics people are still looking for humanistic solutions. Philippe Noiret heads a great cast (with Charles Vanel) in this mellow reflection on 'the things of life.' Three Brothers Region B Blu-ray + Pal DVD Arrow Academy (UK) 1981 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 111 min. / Street Date April 4, 2016 / Tre fratelli / Available from Amazon UK  Starring Philippe Noiret, Michele Placido, Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Charles Vanel, Andréa Ferréol, Maddalena Crippa, Rosaria Tafuri, Marta Zoffoli, Simonetta Stefanelli. Cinematography Pasqualino De Santis Editor Ruggero Mastroianni Original Music Piero Piccioni Written by Tonino Guerra, Francesco Rosi from the book by A. Platonov Produced by Antonio Macri, Giorgio Nocella Directed by Francesco Rosi

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

So few of Francesco Rosi's films were released in the United States that until Criterion's disc of Salvatore Giuliano my only image of...

Colcoa French Film Festival, "9 Days of Film Premieres in Hollywood," and its producer, the Franco-American Cultural Fund, have  announced the Focus on a Filmmaker program as well as an exclusive line up of predominantly digitally restored French Classics, presented as World, International or U.S. Premieres. All screenings will take place at the Directors Guild of America.

The Colcoa Classics Series will be shown from Tuesday 19 to Saturday 23 and on Monday April 25 as part of the 20th anniversary program.

Focus on a Filmmaker: Academy Award0 Nominee Jean-Paul Rappeneau

Colcoa will honor Academy Award-nominated writer-director Jean-Paul Rappeneau on Thursday, April 21 with the World Premiere of new digitally restored "A Matter of Resistance"  (1965), starring Catherine Deneuve and Philippe Noiret, as well as the U.S. Premiere of his new film "Families.," which had its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. Rappeneau joins previous honorees, writer-directors Michel Hazanavicius, Cédric Klapisch, Bertrand Blier, Costa Gavras, Florent Siri, Julie Delpy and Alain Resnais, whose key bodies of work have been cited in past festivals.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau will make a rare personal appearance as well as meeting audience members for a Happy Hour Talk panel dedicated to his work. (Colcoa Classics + Panel +Premiere of "Families"). This focus is presented with the support of TF1 International.

International Premiere of Digitally Restored "More"

Writer-director Barbet Schroeder, feted at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, will have a Colcoa-presented International Premiere of his digitally restored masterpiece, "More" (1969), in association with Les Films du Losange and Janus Films. Initially banned in France, Schroeder's debut feature cast the myth of Icarus as a cautionary tale of free love and drug addiction in the shadow of the May '68 Paris, illustrated by an original score by The Pink Floyd. (Colcoa Classics)

45th Anniversary of "Delusions of Grandeur"

The digitally restored version of writer-director Gérard Oury's hit comedy, "Delusions of Grandeur" (1971), will have its U.S. Premiere at the festival. Co-written with his daughter, Danièle Thompson, and Marcel Jullian, this historical spoof of the Victor Hugo play,Ruy Blasfeatures a first -time collaboration of two French giants, Louis de Funès and Yves Montand ."Delusions of Grandeur" will be presented in association with French studio Gaumont (celebrating its own 120th anniversary). (Colcoa Classics)

- International Premeire of Digitally Restored "Marius"

Colcoa will present the digitally restored version of "Marius" (1931), the first part of the famous trilogy taking place in Marseille, created by novelist Marcel Pagnol and writer director Alexander Korda. It stars Pierre Fresnay, Fernand Charpin , Raimu and Orane Demazis. This exclusive presentation in the U.S. is made possible by the Franco American Cultural Fund (Facf), which supported the restoration, La Cinémathèque Française and Les Films Marcel Pagnol. (Colcoa Classics)

- Internatonal Premiere of the Digitally Restored "They Were Five"

A special 80th anniversary screening of digitally restored "They Were Five" (La belle équipe) (1936) will be offered to the Colcoa audience just weeks after its French release. Thus, the festival will pay tribute to writer-director Julien Duvivier (born 120 years ago) who was the first filmmaker to cast two French stars Jean Gabin and Charles Vanel in this classic, popular, social comedy (presented with the support of Pathé International - (Colcoa Classics)

- World Premiere of Digitally Restored Colcoa Hit: "On Guard"  

Romance and revenge are the main ingredients in this sweeping swashbuckler set in a lavish 17th century backdrop. "On Guard,"   which premiered 19 years ago at Colcoa, stars Daniel Auteuil, Philippe Noiret, Fabrice Luchini, three of the multi-star cast and co-written and directed by Philippe de Broca. The festival will present the World Premiere of the restored version for its U.S. release by The Cohen Media Group (Colcoa Classics)

From April 18 to April 26, 2016, filmgoers will celebrate the 20th edition of Colcoa French Film Festival  at the Directors Guild of America.

The full line-up of films in competition for the Colcoa Cinema and Television Awards, will be announced before March 29 .

A friend pointed out that a shot of a girl on a swing in Renoir's A Day in the Country (filmed in 1936, completed in 1945) seemed surprisingly similar to one in Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932). The girl swings, and the camera swings with her. Was Renoir influenced by Florey? Both men were French. Maybe Papa Jean was a Bela Lugosi fan. But now it seems like both were influenced by Charles Vanel, who includes an identical shot in the only film he directed, Dans la nuit (1929).Vanel also sets his camera on various fairground rides, and in this, as well as much of his visual style, he seems influenced by the impressionist school: Jean Epstein features a long, ecstatic funfair scene in his Cœur fidèle (1923). Like Epstein, Vanel exults in hallucinatory moments of disorientation, transient effects of light, and contrasting overheated emotion with gritty locations and a naturalistic depiction of working life.

Flicker Alley's release 0f The House of Mystery (La maison du mystère) restores to light a major movie serial almost lost forever, and allows us again to appreciate the talents of the White Russian filmmakers who greatly energized French filmmaking in the 1920s. In particular, star Ivan Mosjoukine and director Alexander Volkoff, who would also collaborate on Kean (1924) and Casanova (1927) are approaching the height of their powers.The plot is pure melodrama: a mill owner is framed for murder, escapes from a penal colony, and spends years trying to clear his name, while the real killer woos his wife. But the ten episodes use their extended cumulative running time to explore nuances of character rather than to pile on implausible escapes and battles (though there are a few extremely impressive examples of those). The result is a tale of injustice that grips and satisfies, while displaying a highly sophisticated cinematic sense.

Earlier this week, we gave you details on first wave of special experiences and events taking place at the 2015 Stanley Film Festival. We now have details on their impressive slate of features, short films, and additional special events, including screenings of The Final Girls, Deathgasm, Stung, The Invitation, and We Are Still Here.

We're teaming up with the festival for live coverage and special opportunities for Daily Dead readers, so be sure to check back all month for contests, features, and more.

"April 2, 2014 (Denver, Co) - The Stanley Film Festival (Sff) produced by the Denver Film Society (Dfs) and presented by Chiller, announced today its Closing Night film, Festival lineup and the 2015 Master of Horror. The Festival will close out with The Final Girls. The film, directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson, is the story of a young woman grieving the loss of her mother, a famous scream queen from the 1980s,...

Sean Penn: Honorary César goes Hollywood – again (photo: Sean Penn in '21 Grams') Sean Penn, 54, will receive the 2015 Honorary César (César d'Honneur), the French Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Crafts has announced. That means the French Academy's powers-that-be are once again trying to make the Prix César ceremony relevant to the American media. Their tactic is to hand out the career award to a widely known and relatively young – i.e., media friendly – Hollywood celebrity. (Scroll down for more such examples.) In the words of the French Academy, Honorary César 2015 recipient Sean Penn is a "living legend" and "a stand-alone icon in American cinema." It has also hailed the two-time Best Actor Oscar winner as a "mythical actor, a politically active personality and an exceptional director." Penn will be honored at the César Awards ceremony on Feb. 20, 2015. Sean Penn movies Sean Penn movies range from the teen comedy...

Curtis Bernhardt followed the route of his fellow directors Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak: Germany, France, America, but unlike them he never went back to film in Germany at the end of his career. I looked at his Marlene Dietrich vehicle here. Now let's consider one from his French period.

Carrefour (Crossroads) is an amnesia thriller. Je t'aime amnesia thrillers. They're particularly interesting since the kind of movie amnesia where you forget who you are appears not to exist in real life: if you lost your identity, you would have lost so many other brain functions it's doubtful you would be abe to talk about it. The device remains popular not just because it's so useful for crazy plots, but because questions of identity fascinate us.

(Speaking of crazy plots: French novelist Sebastien Japrisot, whose name itself was an anagram, wrote one of the best, the twice-filmed A Trap For Cinderella.

Yippee-ki-yay! It's action-movie time! From Die Hard to Deliverance, here's what the Guardian and Observer's critics think are the 10 best ever made. Let us know what you think in the comments below

• Top 10 romantic movies

Peter Bradshaw on action movies

In some ways, it should be the quintessential cinema genre. After all, what does the director shout at the beginning of a take? Action – at times a euphemism for violence and machismo – evolved into a recognisable genre in the 80s. Gunplay and athleticism resurfaced in a sweatier and more explicitly violent form, with movies such as Sylvester Stallone's First Blood. The hardware was all-important, and the metallic sheen of the guns was something to be savoured alongside the musculature of the heroes. The genre spawned the action hero. These were not pretty-boys there to melt female hearts: they were there to get a roar of approval from the guys.

A father, worried sick that his wife may be dead, walks his son and daughter across a rain-slicked square, while a long line of black-clad children from an orphanage snakes past them in the other direction. The bars of a castle-shaped birdcage, which has been the backdrop for a bitter quarrel between an aristocrat and his middle-aged mistress, gives way to a shot of a mountaintop hotel crisscrossed by countless panes of glass. A man and woman on the verge of an affair walk through an empty seaside house that evokes both their waning marriages and the life they will never have together.

Those are three moments from the three movies in Eclipse's set, Jean Grémillon During the Occupation: Le ciel est à vous, Lumière d'été and Remorques. This DVD release marks an extraordinary stroke of luck for those who, like me, had barely heard of this director. How often does anyone encounter,...

Every time I watch a Jean Grémillon film I feel compelled to write about the experience here. Either the films are excellent, like Gueule d'amour, or they're something more than that, like Maldone or La petite Lise—attempts to reinvent cinema or to send the talking picture spinning off into a new direction.

Daïnah la métisse (1932) shows Gremillon still pushing the expressive possibilities of sound cinema that he had opened up in the poorly-received La petite Lise. If the rejection of that first talkie, regarded as both too seedy and downbeat and too experimental and strange, caused him to rethink his approach, there's little evidence here, since Daïnah is a tragic tale delivered with a similarly somnambular pace, making free use of unexpected angles and a bold approach to both sound effects and narrative. It's as if Grémillon  trusted the world to come around to his way of looking at things.

DVD Release Date: July 24, 2012

Price: DVD $44.95

Studio: Criterion

Jean Gabin gets involved with Michèle Morgan in Jean Grémillon's 1941 film Remorques.

The Criterion Collection continued its love affair with the great filmmakers of France with Eclipse Series 34: Jean Grémillon During the Occupation, a selection of three film dramas and romances.

Though little known outside of France, Jean Grémillon was a consummate filmmaker from his country’s golden age. A classically trained violinist who discovered cinema as a young man when his orchestra was hired to accompany silent movies, he went on to make almost fifty films—which ranged from documentaries to avant-garde works to melodramas with major stars—in a career that started in the mid-1920s and didn’t end until the late 1950s. Three of his richest films came during a dire period in French history: Remorques was begun in 1939 but finished and released after Germany invaded France,...

The fourth in a short series celebrating the films of the Pathé-Natan company, 1926-1934. 

Apart from the innovative films of Gremillon and Ozep, and the super-epics of Raymond Bernard (available from Criterion), Pathé-Natan produced a lot of slick commercial properties decorated with much the same kind of melodrama and glamor as Hollywood movies of the era.

L'équipage (1935) was one of the last Pathé-Natan productions before the studio went bankrupt amid charges of swindling and mismanagement, and they spent lavishly on it. By now, the influx of German talent that had contributed much to the style of French cinema had become a massive flood, as the Nazis had banned Jews from working in cinema. A talent exodus resulted, and Paris was the first stop for nearly everybody. And so Anatole Litvak, eventually bound for Hollywood, pitched up in the City of Light, where, for instance, he made Mayerling...

Rating: 5.0/5.0

Chicago – It’s not often that a film critic gets to write something this blunt and not feel like it’s hyperbole — One of the best films of all time is coming out in Chicago theaters this weekend. A remastered print of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s amazing “The Wages of Fear” will be playing at the Music Box Theatre starting Friday, January 20th, 2012. Be there.

I’m lucky enough to have amassed a significant collection of classic films in the decade I’ve been covering DVD and Blu-ray and, naturally, my Criterion Collection titles are among my most coveted. Within that group, the edition for Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear” holds a particularly special place. This is a stunning film, of the same caliber as his more-well-known “Diabolique,” which he would make only two years later (and is also available from Criterion). Released in the United States almost exactly 56 years ago,...

by Vadim Rizov

The well known numbers fueling Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, which soon screens in a new 35mm print at NYC's Film Forum: 148 minutes, two trucks, three hundred miles, four men, lots of nitroglycerin. An oil fire's raging at a far-away outpost, and the Southern Oil Company (which, as Roger Ebert noted, non-coincidentally has the same initials as Standard Oil) needs explosives to put it out; with roads in this unnamed South American oil republic so unstable the slightest jostle will blow up the truck, it'll take some truly desperate losers to undertake the trip—men like Mario (Yves Montand) and Luigi (Folco Lulli). (It's unknown if Nintendo named their video-game duo in deliberate homage.) The former best friends have their relationship torn apart at the film's start by the arrival in town of barrel-chested Jo (Charles Vanel), who wears his gut as an emblem of...

On December 21st, director Steven Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson will bring Herg&#233's internationally iconic comic book characters to the big screen with the motion capture mystery The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn.

But this isn't the first time Tintin, his faithful dog Snowy, Captain Haddock, and the rest of the gang have been immortalized in a big screen outing. The beloved characters were first brought to cinemas in the rarely seen 1947 black and white stop motion animated film The Crab with the Golden Claws. This was followed by two live action family movies: 1961's Tintin and the Golden Fleece and 1964's Tintin and the Blue Oranges.

Both movies have served as inspiration for director Steven Spielberg, not only in bringing Tintin and his pals to life once again in theaters worldwide, but also in his earlier work. We have trailers for both live action Tintin movies below,...

When we deal with the French New Wave, it is difficult to bear in mind that it was a movement that went far beyond a handful of directors. Being driven by cinephilia, it was a response to the possibilities of cinema and this comes home to us again and again even when we see the work of ‘minor’ artists like Jacques Deray who went on to make more commercially viable films like Borsalino (1970), a star vehicle for Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Deray remained an excellent craftsman in his latter films but his second feature Rififi in Tokyo (1963), virtually unseen today, is even radical for the way in which it deals with the genre of the heist film to produce a philosophical reflection worthy of Jean-Luc Godard at the height of his powers.

Rififi in Tokyo belongs to the category of films beginning with Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955), a film about a robbery gone wrong.

Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953

When Henri-Georges Clouzot took on a genre, it generally led to a classic: so Les Diaboliques is one of the most frightening pictures ever put on screen; The Mystery of Picasso is among the most outstanding films exploring the work of an artist; and The Wages of Fear has no superior in the field of action-suspense. Set in an unnamed south American country, the action starts in a small town with an airfield where we are introduced to four shady characters anxious to get out, but minus the money for a plane ticket. A very venal oil company offers them $2,000 each to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerine over rough mountain roads to an oilfield that is on fire. The roads are awful. The hazards are unlimited. And the nitro, sweating in the heat, itches to explode long before it gets to the oilfield.

The way Clouzot films this...

This classic French battle between love, fate and bewitching passion set a pattern for later hits such as Casablanca

This classic example of pre-war French "poetic realism", directed by the great Belgian movie-maker Jacques Feyder, centres on an upper-class playboy business man (Pierre Richard-Willm) with financial problems being compelled to leave Paris and his high-maintenance lover Florence, and join the Foreign Legion in Morocco. A couple of years later as a reckless, hard-drinking sergeant, he meets a beautiful prostitute, the amnesiac Irma who's Florence's double, though their hair colour and voices are different. Can they be the same woman? A story of love, death and fate, this truly adult movie has a great cast that includes Marie Bell as both Florence and Irma, Charles Vanel as a vile hotelier and Françoise Rosay as a compassionate barmaid who predicts the hero's troubled future. Lazare Meerson's sets range from art deco Paris to Moroccan nightclubs,...

Creamed corn and the Technicolor yawn ... when did vomiting cease to be a movie taboo?

You might not want to read this over breakfast. Not long ago, in the course of a single day, I watched four films. The first three featured projectile vomiting, while the fourth showed a woman throwing up into a toilet bowl, after which she had to fish her mobile phone out of the puke. And, as an afterthought, her chewing gum as well.

Vomit has become such a recurring motif in today's cinema that it has almost ceased to make an impact, unless it comes with a gimmick, like the turbo-powered, Pepto-Bismol-coloured puke in Gentlemen Broncos, or someone being sick on a squirrel in Hot Tub Time Machine.

At what point did vomiting cease to be a movie taboo? The first instance of explicit vomiting I could think of was in The Wages of Fear...

La mort en ce jardin / Death in the Garden (1956) Direction: Luis Buñuel Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza, and Raymond Queneau; dialogue by Queneau and Gabriel Arout; from a novel by José-André Lacour Cast: Georges Marchal, Simone Signoret, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Michèle Girardon, Raul Ramirez Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal Death in the Garden I hadn’t even heard of Death in the Garden before its recent DVD release on the Microcinema label. It ranks as among the least-known of Luis Buñuel’s films, probably because it’s the least obviously Buñuelian. Aside from some fairly incidental bits of surrealist imagery – a freshly killed snake devoured by ants; Simone Signoret dressed in an evening gown and diamonds in the [...]...

Of the forgotten nonpareils to have been found by DVDing in the neglected, semi-seen recesses of Luis Buñuel's world-class filmography, none may seem odder than "Death in the Garden" (1956). A semi-Marxist workers' rebellion drama that segues into a lost-in-the-wilderness survival adventure? Shot in Mexico with a famous French cast (Simone Signoret, Michel Piccoli, Charles Vanel) right in the middle of the filmmaker's "Mexican period," during which the world had supposedly forgotten about him? In color? Except it's not so freakish when you remember he shot a version of "Robinson Crusoe" two years earlier, in color, and that his Mexican films were making it to the Venice and Cannes fests, even before the earthquake of "Viridiana" in 1961.

Thumbnailing a filmography of almost 50 years is never easy or effective, but more to the point is the startling realization of how much Buñuel there is still to see. I count over a...

Not unlike the South American town that holds captive the film's heroes, Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear grabs onto its audience and refuses to let go. The story of a group of desperate men who enlist in a suicide mission driving nitrogycerine across unpaved and highly volatile terrain, the film is a case study in suspense thanks not only to its set-up but the shockingly complete and effective performances of its stars, who seem to literally endure what their characters go through en route to a great reward - be it in this world or the next.

Yves Montand and Charles Vanel play Mario and Jo, two schemers who attach themselves to one another only to discover that both are equally without prospects. After exhausting the commercial possibilities of the dusty border town they are otherwise unable to escape, they stumble across a dangerous but profitable opportunity: drive...

Chicago – The Criterion Collection continues their brilliant Blu-Ray release pattern this week in which they induct a new film into the collection (“In the Realm of the Senses,” which will be reviewed separately) and bring one of their most beloved titles on to the next-gen format on the same street date. The classic this week is the amazing and timeless “The Wages of Fear,” better than ever in HD.

Blu-Ray Rating: 5.0/5.0 “The Wages of Fear” is about a group of men caught in a desperate, isolated situation in a small South American town. From all over the world, these people are literally stuck. They can’t afford the plane ticket to leave and don’t really have anywhere to go if they could. They are lost souls.

The Wages of Fear was released on Blu-Ray on April 21st, 2009.

Photo credit: Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

On the outskirts of this small town,...

Cary Grant steals again in this re-release of Alfred Hitchcock.s To Catch a Thief. He.s joined by leading lady, and soon to be princess, Grace Kelly in what is certainly a classic in Master Hitchcock.s filmography. John Robie (Cary Grant) is retired. The problem is that he.s a retired jewel thief, known as the Cat. The police have come looking for him since robberies that seem much like his own have been recently staged. He gives the cops the slip but wants to catch the thief that has caused him all this trouble. H.H. Hughson (John Williams) is an insurance agent and acquaintance of Robie.s restaurateur friend Bertani (Charles Vanel). Robie enlists Hughson to give him a list...