Marc Allégret
Nobles try desperately to cling to the crumbling aristocracy in the days following World War I. The Count (Jean-Claude Brialy) and his Countess Mahe (Sylvia Fennec) delight in throwing lavish costume balls. The couple develops a friendship with a young boy who delights in the parties thrown by the noble couple. Love soon blooms between the Countess and the boy as she searches for something more than a string of endless parties and social affairs. The masquerades are an attempt to freeze time and hold on to the nostalgia of a bygone era. For fear of losing her, the Count allows the Countess to continue her love affair.
This drama's main asset is Charles Boyer as Pierre, a father out looking for his son one night. Pierre receives a call from a woman who says she will kill herself because of his son. Naturally disturbed at this news, Pierre takes off to find his son and avert disaster. Along the way, he picks up a malcontent, wealthy young woman who decides to stick with him and help him look for his son. After traveling through some of the worst aspects of Paris' demi-monde, Pierre begins to wonder if his son will ever be found. Meanwhile, the relationship with his newfound wealthy friend is heating up.
A beautiful 18-year-old orphan escapes from a reformatory and hooks up wth a gang of jewel smugglers, and decides on a life of crime. However, she falls for and marries a policeman, putting a crimp in her criminal career.
Jean Brevent still did not understand the departure of his wife, Danielle Darieux. It's been five years, but he still can't forget her. In spite of a work of writer originator in a newspaper, in which it tried to be invested completely, time did not make its work. One day, by chance, he meets her in the bus...
Due to an urgent need of money, Agnes participates in an amateur striptease contest. Her new boyfriend, Daniel, who is a reporter by profession, covers the contest for his magazine.
At the Conservatory of Vienna the student only have eyes for their beautiful singing teacher, tenor Eric Walter.
Based on D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel of the same name, Lady Chatterley’s Lover stars Danielle Darrieux, Leo Genn, and Erno Crisa in this controversial tale of adultery! After her husband is paralyzed from fighting in WWI, Lady Chatterley feels a loss of intimacy between her husband and herself, and decides to have an affair with the gamekeeper, a man of a lower class.
At a wedding party involving three beautiful women, a young man should choose the most charming. But a professor intervenes to prevent the verdict, remembering the troubles caused by Paris in a similar situation.
Anthology film in which Hedy Lamarr plays 2 queens during 2 different time periods. Ulmer directed the Genoveffa di Brabante part whereas Allégret was responsible for the empress Josephine section after he left due to artistic differences with Lamarr.
Nobel-prize-winning author, social justice crusader, anti-colonialist, adventure traveler, musician, and one-time Communist: André Gide was a larger-than-life character who dominated French letters from the turn of the 20th century to his death in 1951. Directed by Marc Allégret, with whom Gide traveled extensively in French Equatorial Africa, the With André Gide was made in the year leading up to the writer’s death.
Rosette is young and charming but she is crippled so she cannot make the most of her life. Which upsets Jules Petitpas, a single inventor, her eccentric but kind-hearted neighbor. Jules pledges to help her by creating a potion that will cure her. Unfortunately he dies before being able to achieve his aim. But a promise is a promise, and the good man comes back to the land of the living as an ... ectoplasm! And he manages to involve a whole tribe of ghosts to assist him in the noble task of saving the young lady. All is well that ends well.
A blackmailer is murdered, and those who witnessed the scene agree to keep quiet; the complication is that the scene is also witnessed by a young artist, a victim of blackmail as well. (BFI Website)
At the beginning of the 20th century, in the North of the Province of Quebec. After five years spent in a boarding school, Maria Chapdelaine comes back to the family farm. Robert Gagnon, a villager and childhood friend, loves her secretly but Maria is wooed by Lorenzo Surprenant, a man who has fled his home town to escape the police. The one she is really in love with is François Paradis, a handsome trapper. The latter promises to marry her in the spring, as soon as he is back from the Far North. Robert, who is aware of how miserable Maria is, writes a letter to François , asking him to come back at once. Unfortunately, the young trapper is buried under the snow during a storm. As for Lorenzo he gets gunned down by the police. Finally understanding that Robert has sacrificed himself out of love for her, Maria accepts to become his wife.
Penniless governess Blanche Fullerton takes a job at the estate of her rich relations, the Fury family. To better her position in life, Blanche marries her dull cousin, Laurence Fury, with whom she has a daughter. But before long, boredom sets in, and Blanche begins a tempestuous romance with stableman Philip Thorn. Together, they hatch a murderous plan to gain control of the estate.
In 1939, the "Union des Jeunes Filles de France", a French communist movement, sponsored this documentary short constituting a tour de France of farms, factories and workshop where young women work, thus taking charge of their own destiny.
François, Cécilia and Isabelle are students of the drama class of the Conservatoire led by Professor Lambertin. François is in love with Isabelle who also loves him, but he is pursued by Cecilia, his former mistress. Cécilia commits suicide staging the suicide like a crime, so as to involve Francis. But a testimony restores the truth.
Unhappy with her humdrum life as a provincial schoolteacher, Audrey Greenwood marries Major Carter, an officer in the British Army whom she does not love. Not long after the wedding Carter is on his way to Malaysia, accompanied by his wife, to take up a post in the British colony. During the long sea voyage, Audrey becomes acquainted with the handsome Prince Selim, the heir to the Malaysian throne. Life in the province of Malacca soon proves disagreeable to the free-spirited Englishwoman and she becomes a social outcast when her amorous affair with the prince is discovered.
After a year of turbulent marriage Annette and Daniel get a divorce, and each marries again. However, they meet again on the French Riviera and are tempted to give in to their old passion...
Political turmoil convulses 19th-century Russia as Razumov, a young student preparing for a career in the czarist bureaucracy, unwittingly becomes embroiled in the assassination of a public official.
Sylvie, a rich girl, learns at the same time the death and the ruin of her father. Forced to find work in Paris, she is given shelter by a medical student who soon falls for her. Another young man falls in love with her. When her benefactor gets ill and finally dies, Sylvie refuses to give the other man her heart out of faithfulness for the dearly departed. But youth commands and after a time love -but not oblivion - triumphs.
A handsome but penniless young man takes a summer job as a swimming instructor in a picturesque Alpine lake resort. He falls in love with a young heiress who is staying there with her father, but he also grabs the attention of tomboyish Puck who lives on the other side of the lake and who saves him from drowning one foggy night. Further havoc is caused by the arrival of Eric's old sweetheart whose husband is wanted by the police.
Rémy (Robert Lynen), a stolen child is adopted by a wandering singer. With him and his trained animals, Rémy travels the roads of France. But his adoptive father dies and Remy, who has knowledge of a boy who knows something of his history, sails for England to find his mother.
Picking up moments after the end of Marius, this film follows Fanny’s grief after Marius’s departure—and her realization that she’s pregnant. Panisse continues courting her and embraces the baby’s impending arrival as a gift, so long as its paternity remains a secret. Fanny and Panisse wed, but after her baby’s birth, Marius returns unexpectedly and demands what he believes is still his.
A one-night stand with an entertainer threatens to destroy a woman's marriage after she gives birth to a black child.
A bank employee who stole money at work falls in the hands of a dangerous escaped convict whose girlfriend is going to help him out of this mess.
Célestin, the organist of a convent, has written and composed a light operetta under the name of Floridor. One day, the Mother Superior asks him to chaperone one of the boarders, Denise de Flavigny, who is returning home to get married. Now, Denise, for all her goody goody looks, soon proves as saucy as can be. Things get even more complicated when Célestin starts courting Corinne, the star of his operetta, to the great displeasure of a commander of dragons, the young woman's lover. Worse, the latter is none other than the Mother Superior's brother... To say nothing of Lieutenant Fernand de Champlatreux, who happens to fall in love with Denise, his fiancée that he has never seen before...!
Cinema has long fed our fascination with other cultures, and appears to be just one facet of what is a fundamentally visual fascination. One of the most elaborate manifestations of this was the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale, held in Paris to celebrate ‘la France des 5 continents’. This exhibition sought to represent to the people of France their colonial world by reordering and reconstructing it into scenes or tableaux of everyday indigenous life. This entailed shipping over scores of indigènes and forcing them to act out the gestures of their ‘everyday lives’ under the eyes of 1930’s Parisian society. A slightly less elaborate, although equally controversial at the time, visual representation of The Other was one of the first film documentaries to be made which sought to represent the lives of a colonised people, Marc Allégret’s Voyage au Congo.
