Arletty, Lady Paname

....Arletty was all this and more;my favorite French actress ,she possesses a voice you cannot mistake for another one.I second to everything my good friend writer's reign wrote.

This Docu focuses on Arletty's salad days and on the war years followed by the sad days of the "epuration".Only five minutes were given over to her fifteen last professional years;we are told she triumphed on stage (they say Brando loved her portrayal of Blanche Du Bois" in Williams play) and had to content herself with supporting parts,which is untrue.she played several leading parts ,notably in "Portrait d'Un Assassin" "L'air De Paris" "L'amour madame" and mainly in two films the French critics have recently restored to favor : Jacqueline Audry's -who was long before Varda,THE female director of the French cinema - "Huis Clos" ("no exit" from Sartre) and "Gibier De Potence" .

Apart from this,the film does the great actress justice .Frederic Mitterrand ,the late president's nephew and an historian,and Jean-Claude Brialy complain about the way she was treated after the war;she was,as Mitterrand cleverly states ,a WW1 child,her first love was killed on the first day of the massacre ,then she decided she would not have a child cause a child is bound to be a soldier (she would have an abortion in the thirties).She expresses her disgust for war and above all,her disgust for "holy" war!And Mitterrand points out that Alexandre Trauner -who would work with Billy Wilder and other American luminaries- who was a Jew would have been sent to the concentration camps if it hadn't been for Arletty's protection;the same goes for poet Tristan Bernard.

After the liberation,some could not forget she had a German lover;many artists were in trouble too:Sacha Guitry,Ginette Leclerc ,Henri-Georges Clouzot;the "épuration" was so absurd a "clean" film such as "le Ciel est à Vous" was deemed "pétainist".Arletty was never an informer,and it's obvious she tried to save as many people as she could.Like Madame Tallien during the 1793-94 Terror years of the French Revolution.

Some day,they will make a movie based on her life.