Jules Berry
For Les étoiles ne meurent jamais, director/archivist Max De Vaucorbeil has assembled precious film clips of such Gallic greats as Louis Jouvet, Raimu, Harry Baur, Louis Salou and Marguerite Moreno. Francois Perier's narration links the various vignettes together. In its own way, Les Etoiles ne Maurent Jamais can be seen as a precursor to those now-ubiquitous "tributes" on such cable services as American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies.
Three powerhouse European screen personalities--Pierre Brasseur, Erich Von Stroheim, Maria Montez---elevate the tawdry melodramatics of Le Portrait d'Un Assassin.
Alex Grégoire is a timid insurance company clerk who shares his uneventful life between his wife Angèle, his colleagues and his passion for crosswords. But all of a sudden his existence changes dramatically. First because he wins a crossword competition. Second because a jewel thief, Charles Tuffal, thinks he recognizes in him a former accomplice. From that moment "uneventful" is not the best adjective to qualify Alex's life anymore...
An aspiring singer tries to break into films during the early talkie era. She is hired to dub the singing and speaking voice of a silent-movie favorite. Sworn to secrecy, the fill-in must stand by in silence as the star receives all the praises and plaudits.
A young mechanic is given a strange job: to convey the king of the gypsies' embalmed dead body on a very long route.
A young man comes back to his hometown to be confronted with a bourgeois obnoxious family who has always despised his -now dead - parents because they were music hall artists, "entertainers". But because he's the sole legatee of an uncle's fortune, his relatives become friendly with him.. at least for a while.
Emma, who is married to lawyer Giulio Scarli, is secretly in love with Fabrizio Arcieri, who works with her husband.
The film is biographical, telling the story of the life and artistic struggles of the French composer Hector Berlioz. Berlioz is shown as a recalcitrant medical student in an anatomy class dreaming of becoming a composer; at a demonstration during a performance at the Paris Opéra conducted by Habeneck; at supper with other young artists (Hugo, Janin, Dumas, Mérimée, Delacroix); and chasing after his future wife Harriet Smithson, after a performance of Hamlet. Also depicted are his life in a garret, while suffering from an illness due to an abscess in the throat; a visit from his mother who curses him; and the composition of the Symphonie fantastique. The film then shows his marital breakdown, the premiere of his opera Benvenuto Cellini, his travels throughout Europe, his second marriage to Marie Recio (called "Marie Martin" in the film), public acceptance in old age and reconciliation with his son.
Having pulled off a robbery with his friend Maurice, Olivier leaves his mistress Lola and hides out in a small village in the country. He finds work, thanks to a young man named Gilbert, who introduces him to his sister, Monique. Once the robbery has been all but forgotten, Olivier intends to head back to Paris, but before he goes, he steals money from his employer. In Paris, Olivier wants to say a proper goodbye to Lola, but she is being blackmailed by Jérôme, an antique dealer who has recognized a necklace stolen by Olivier. Before returning to Monique, Olivier calls on Jérôme to recover the necklace.
At the end of the 15th century, two minstrels Gilles and Dominique come from nowhere into the castle of Baron Hugues. Gilles charms Anne, Hughes' daughter, while Dominique charms both Hugues and Ann's fiance. Gilles and Dominique are not really in love : they are sent by the Devil to desperate people. But Ann is so pure that Gilles is caught to his own trap... How will they fight against the Devil ?
The forbidden romance between wealthy Giselle Preville and impoverished journalist Claude Dauphin. When Preville disappears, Dauphin is accused of kidnapping by the girl's snobbish father Rene Alexander. By the time the Normandie reaches New York, however, the "mystery" is solved and all misunderstandings blithely swept away.
After committing a murder, a man locks himself in his apartment and recollects the events the led him to the killing.
A famous violinist enlists in a music school in order to woo one of the students.
A wealthy industrialist, Roger de Vetheuil, married, feels assured of aging in peace. Then appears a blackmailer who accuses him of being a usurper, actually called Jean Pelletier, a mobster well known to police. Vetheuil, judging himself slandered, refuses to listen to his tormentor and goes to the police. The man speaks. The scandal is public soon ...
This murder mystery is set in a Parisian cafe and examines the mysterious murder of a famed journalist and extortionist who is killed at his table in the cafe. Though the prime suspects are gathered together( including his wife and her lover, the gun-runner, the creditor, and a playboy) and all of them have motives, none of them did it. So whodunit?
Two journalists from different papers are looking for the same story. They want to know, who a group of gangsters getting young women from Europe to South America, where they are forced to work in brothels. But the gangsters have their own battels against each over, so the journalists can escape the danger, in which they've brought themselves.
Arsène Lupin decides to run a detective agency in addition to being a gentleman thief. As a detective he happens to cooperate with police in order to unveil the criminal activities of a villain. When he succeeds the villain returns the favour. The unmasked Arsène Lupin manages to escape with the villain's gangster moll as his new companion.
A rich young woman asks a poor man to play for her the role of a generous friend. He ends up falling in love.
Count Hubert de Latour Latour is the lover of the Duchess de Maulévrier. The day he is surprised by the Duke in the company of his wife and... in a rather compromising situation, Hubert resorts to a subterfuge, claiming that he has come to see the Duchess to seek support to be elected at the Institut de France, whose chairman is precisely her husband. The latter takes him at his word and Hubert becomes... a member of the French Academy! Which just shows that everything leads to everything.
A man and a woman arrive in a cafe-hotel near the belgian frontier. The customers recognize the man from the police's description. His name is Amedee Lange, he murdered Batala in Paris. His lady friend Valentine tells the whole story : Lange was an employee in Batala's little printing works. Batala was a real bastard, swindling every one, seducing female workers of Valentine's laundry... One day he fled to avoid facing his creditors, and the workers set up a cooperative to go on working. But the plot is less important that the description of the atmosphere just before the Popular Front.
Two second-rate, hammy actors, Hector Trignol and Achille Baluchet, come up with a fake murder story to draw attention to themselves. Baluchet is to kill Trignol, who will temporarily disappear then reappear, as if by magic, during the trial. But things don't go according to plan.
A woman staying at a health spa (Lillian Harvey, goes to the theater every night to see "Quick" a comic performer, who wears clown make-up. She meets him off stage, without make-up and doesn't recognize him. He courts her, hoping she'll like him for himself but she maintains her crush on "Quick."
