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‘Save Our School’, ‘Christophe… définitivement’ will debut on the beach.

Two world premieres will take place on the beach in Cannes as part of the 2022 Cinema de la Plage lineup – Carine May and Hakim Zouhani’s Save Our School and Ange Leccia and Dominique Gonzales-Foerster’s Christophe… définitivement.

Save Our School is a French comedy about two teachers’ attempts to establish Paris’ first suburban ‘green school’, to quell the competition from a new hall of residence nearby. It is produced by Barbara Letellier and Carole Scotta for France’s Haut et Court, in co-production with France 2 Cinema; with France TV Distribution handling sales.

The Cannes Film Festival has unveiled the program of its Cinema de la Plage section which launched last year with a mix of restored classics, cult films and premieres.

Open to all audiences, the Cinema de la Plage will take place on the beach every evening and will be free of charge. The program, which runs alongside the Official Selection, will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather,” the 40th anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.,” as well as Peter Weir’s “The Truman Show” with Jim Carrey.

“Save Our School,” a socially-minded and timely comedy directed by Carine May and Hakim Zouhani, will have its world premiere as part of Cinema de La Plage. The screening will be attended by the filmmakers and cast members Anaïde Rozam, Sérigne M’Baye, Gilbert Melki, Sébastien Chassagne and Mourad Boudaoud.

Other movies on the Cinema de la Plage...

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...

Above: Alternative poster for Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, Australia/USA, 2015). Artist: Signalstarr.Movie Poster of the Week was on vacation for the past few weeks and for the first time in three and a half years I took a break from posting a poster a day on Tumblr. Since getting back I have been posting the best new posters that I missed while I was away, one of which—the teaser for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight which was unveiled at Comic-Con last week—has racked up more likes in a single day than almost anything else I’ve posted in the past three months.The standout favorite of the past quarter however—with over 1400 likes and re-blogs to date—was this stunning alternative poster for Mad Max: Fury Road by the British artist known as Signalstarr, a.k.a. Nick Stewart Hoyle. As a rule I...

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...

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...

Above: 1964 poster for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, Germany, 1920).

I’ve written a lot about the German designer Hans Hillmann in these pages and elsewhere, and the current exhibition running through September 27 at the Kemistry Gallery is a must-see if you’re in London (there are some great images of the exhibit here if you’re not), but I only recently came across the work of a peer and compatriot of Hillmann’s, Karl Oskar Blase. Born the same year as Hillmann, on March 24, 1925, and now in his late 80s, Blase was, like Hillmann, a professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. Art director of the German design magazine Form, Blase designed every cover of the magazine from 1957 to 1968. He is also renowned as a designer of stamps.

Throughout the 1960s Blase also designed film posters for the revival house Atlas Films (as did Hillmann). His posters are mostly a...

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...

The world is all out of whack: multiple Dutch tilts are on display in Voyage sans espoir (1943), an unbelievably glossy poetic realist proto-noir from Christian-Jaque: the film actually begins with railway tracks viewed from the front of a speeding train, upside down, as the camera drunkenly rolls upright and titles come flying towards us, slapping flat across the frame like flies hitting a windshield.

The plot is convoluted but crisp—chance encounters tie together Jean Marais, fleeing his job at a bank to see life and settle in Argentina, with an escaped jailbird of psychopathic demeanor (Paul Bernard) and his girlfriend, the radiant Simone Renant. There's also a likably crooked ship's captain carrying a torch for Renant, a sinister ethnic-type sailor (Ky Duyen), and a pair of hard-drinking but eternally sober detectives who resemble nothing more than the Thompson Twins from Tintin. The French had a nifty way with...

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,...

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,...

I recently watched a short documentary by Andrea Marks called Freedom on the Fence. Made in 2009, and only 40 minutes long, it is a nice introduction to the world of Polish movie posters which concisely explains the particular set of circumstances that gave rise to the incredible flowering of creativity that was the Polish poster of the 1950s and 60s. An audio interview with Henryk Tomaszewski, the father of the modern Polish poster, explains how the systematic destruction of Warsaw by the retreating Nazis in 1945, which left 80% of the city in ruins, gave rise to a landscape of rubble and fences which basically created an open-air art gallery for posters.

At the same time, at the end of the war, there was a six year backlog of American and other foreign cinema that was waiting to be seen in Poland. Tomaszewski remembers being told by the woman in charge of film...

Pyshka, 1934, directed by Mikhail Romm. Romm was an intermittently successful Soviet filmmaker who toed the line, making two biopics of Lenin. The fact that Pyshka was sonorized in 1955, with a voice-over, score and sound effects added, suggests that he was still well-regarded then. Romm had a fantastic eye for composition, light, and character. I don't know too much or have too much to say about him, but I think these images speak for themselves, and it's probable that his own Wwi experience informs the shots of dead soldiers that begin the story, by far the movie's most vivid sequence.

Pyshka is adapted from Guy de Maupassant's story Boule de Suif, which has an interesting cinematic history. One of Maupassant's semi-propagandist works dealing with the Franco-Prussian war, it's been bent to the purposes of a number of different filmmakers, nations, and era.

Basically, the story tells of a party...

Claire Trevor, John Wayne in John Ford's Stagecoach (top); Joan Crawford in Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (middle); Orson Welles in his own Citizen Kane Turner Classic Movies will show a rerun of Moguls & Movie Stars, A History of Hollywood: Warriors & Peace Makers this evening at 7 p.m. This segment of the seven-part Moguls & Movie Stars documentary focuses on Hollywood before, during, and after World War II. Christopher Plummer narrates. Accompanying Moguls & Movie Stars will be four representative Hollywood productions of the period: John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945), and Elia Kazan's Pinky (1949). Lifted from Guy de Maupassant's Boule de suif, Stagecoach is considered by many the best Western ever made. Others find it second only to Ford's The Searchers (1956). Personally, I much prefer the works by Delmer Daves or Anthony Mann. Or Christian-Jaque's Boule de suif (1945), a...

'Sex-kitten' French star who wrote and directed the TV series Belle et Sébastien

In 1950, in a blaze of typical Hollywood publicity, Cécile Aubry, who has died of lung cancer aged 81, was signed up by 20th Century-Fox to co-star with Tyrone Power and Orson Welles in Henry Hathaway's The Black Rose. It was to be Aubry's only American film, placing her among several French actresses who had short-lived Hollywood careers after the liberation of France in 1944.

The petite, blue-eyed blonde with a seductive pout had appeared previously in only one film, playing the title role in Henri-Georges Clouzot's Manon (1949), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival. In this dark updating (to post-second world war Paris) of the Abbé Prévost's 18th-century novel Manon Lescaut, the 20-year-old Aubry made an immediate and vivid impression. She managed to bring out the duality of the character – both femme fatale...

Heavily backlit like some film noir fugitive, the towering figure of Father Christmas lurches towards us from the night, like some kind of bearded Frankenstein monster, maw agape, eyes rolling, outstretched arms gyrating blindly. A zombie Saint Nick. This looks promising, doesn't it?

L'assassinat du Pere Noël (1941) seems to have the distinction of being the first film made in occupied France. It's probably the most festive film ever produced by Nazis. But although Continental Films was a German company, it quickly became known as a better place to work than the French studios, since the censorship was less oppressive there, and since the company was being run by a Frenchman of talent and integrity, Henri-Georges Clouzot.

The movie resembles others Clouzot would direct, and features several of his favourite actors. That, and it's small-town setting, makes it seem at times like a yuletide version of Le corbeau. But the director is Christian-Jaque,...

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...