Louis Vonelly
The history of one of France's most famous streets is retold, featuring multiple performances from Guitry himself.
The battle of the sexes as drawing room social satire. Philippe, a middle-aged newspaper editor, has lived for six years with Paulette, a successful stage actress. He tells her friend Claudine, a realistic and enterprising reporter, that he's thinking of proposing. Into the mix steps Carl Erickson, a charming Hollywood matinée idol in Paris briefly. He meets Paulette, sees her act (his box seat compliments of Philippe), and sets out to seduce her. The next two days bring talk, tears, separation, despair, surprises, and, perhaps, reconciliation as characters speak "exactly half the truth." It's a quadrille of changing partners.
A massive 5 1/2 hour biopic of Napoleon, tracing his career from his schooldays (where a snowball fight is staged like a military campaign), his flight from Corsica, through the French Revolution (where a real storm is intercut with a political storm) and the Terror, culminating in his triumphant invasion of Italy in 1797 (the film stops there because it was intended to be part one of six, but director Abel Gance never raised the money to make the other five). The film's legendary reputation is due to the astonishing range of techniques that Gance uses to tell his story, culminating in the final twenty-minute triptych sequence, which alternates widescreen panoramas with complex multiple- image montages projected simultaneously on three screens.
Philibert Bretonneau signs novels which are actually written by Moluchet, his secretary, secretly in love with Bretonneau's charming wife, Pauline... One day, Jim la houlette, the king of thieves, resurfaces in France. He steals jewels from Madame Clisson, the wife of a lawyer. Saint-Lévy, Bretonneau's publisher, has an idea : to simulate the theft of a manuscript by Jim la houlette, in fact by Moluchet posing as the criminal. But Moluchet, confronted by the real Jim, lets him run away and is arrested...
When bored American billionaire Charles Vanel is amused by the happiness of poor railroad man Nicolas Koline, he offers him a wager: if Koline and his family can spend 20,000 francs a day (about $11,000 in current American money) for a year, then he'll give him a nice pension. The rest of the movie is about the poor man and his family's efforts to win the bet.
