Raimu
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.
An adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Le Eternel Mari", a somber story of marital infidelity, revenge and near madness, and starring Raimu in his last film appearance.
In a Provençal village, two jolly good fellows, Boule and Pons, decide to dress as Saint Anthony and Saint Nicholas for the distribution of presents to the children on the feast of Saint Nicholas. They unfortunately get killed by a cart and find themselves in Hell where Lucifer and his demons duly torment them. They are saved by a prayer which helps them to climb the stairway to Paradise. Saint Peter, taken in by the applicants' disguise, lets them in. When the two true Saints show up, trouble follows. Luckily, thanks to the intervention of the Virgin Mary, the two friends are acquitted at their celestial trial and allowed to return to Earth.
The story of a French officer who is assumed dead during the Napoleonic Wars, but returns ten years later to a very different France, both on a political and personal level. The film is based on the novel Colonel Chabert by Honoré de Balzac.
A rural maiden's two suitors go off to war, leaving her pregnant.
Caesar, a senior French colonist returned home after many years of absence, knows a girl, Marcella, who is in full depression because she was abandoned by her lover. Caesar welcomes her into his home and surrounds her with paternal attention so that he can quickly forget the past. Slowly his feeling turns into a love that Marcella seems to reciprocate. However, when Cesare realizes that the girl feels only gratitude for him and is in love with a younger man, he loses control. Blinded by jealousy, he plans to kill Marcella's lover but, in the face of the girl's vulgarity and indifference, he realizes that he has been teased and turns his anger towards her.
Derniere Jeunesse (Second Childhood) attempts to translate the Irish sentiments of Liam O'Flaherty's novel Mr. Gilhooley into purely Gallic terms. Raimu plays the central character, a middle-ager of the "old school" who offers shelter and comfort to sluttish Jacqueline Delubac. Despite his own reservations, Raimu falls in love with the much-younger girl, remaining faithful to her even after he realizes that she cares only for his money. But when pimp Pierre Brasseur reenters Delubac's life, it is too much for Raimu to bear -- and this, coupled with the return of a mental sickness that Raimu had contracted years earlier in colonial Africa, leads to tragedy. Set in Rouen rather than O'Flaherty's Dublin, Derniere Jeunesse is an uncomfortable but generally satisfying melding of two diametrically opposite styles and sensibilities.
Outwardly, Monsieur Victor would appear to be the model citizen. A respectable Toulon shopkeeper, he has a devoted wife and is courteous and considerate to all who know him. However, beneath this veneer of respectability hides a notorious receiver of stolen goods, who trades with hardened criminals. Victor manages to keep up his double life without any difficulty until the fateful day when one of his partners in crime threatens to expose him. Fearing a scandal, Victor kills the crook in a moment of panic, using a shoemaker's tool. Naturally, the murder is blamed on a local shoemaker, who is sentenced to ten years' hard labour. Seven years later, the former shoemaker reappears in Toulon, having escaped from prison. The first person to recognise him is Monsieur Victor...
In this little Provencal village, a new baker, Aimable, settles down. His wife Aurelie is beautiful and much younger than he. She departs with a shepherd the night after Aimable produces his first breads. Aimable is so afflicted that he can not work anymore. Therefore, the villagers, who initially laughed at his cuckoldry, take the matter very seriously (they want the bread) and organize a plan to find Aurelie and to bring her back to the bakery.
After the death of her husband, Christine realizes she has possibly wasted her life by marrying him instead of the man towards whom, in her youth, she had a stronger inclination. To overcome these dreary thoughts, she decides to find out about him and the other men who danced with her during a ball that was a turning point in her life, many years ago. She pays a visit to those forgotten acquaintances one after the other; Christine is not only surprised to see how they have fared, but also discovers the impact she had, unknowingly, on the feelings and the destiny of these persons.
Madame Pomarel becomes the winner of a prize of virtue awarded by the Academy of Moral Sciences which Monsieur des Aubrais is a prominent member. In reality she walks the cabarets, including the Moulin Rouge, where a succession of misunderstandings will occur with a string of characters.
Paul was in love of haughty one actress, Gilberte Boulanger. Numbed with admiration, every evening, in the armchair 47, he(it) attends the representations of his(its) beautiful. But a series of quiproquos throws(casts) him(it) in the arms of the own girl of the comedienne, Spitz. Fine fly, Gilberte will know how to put out(switch off) the flame which Paul feeds for her and to revive the one that he has to maintain for Spitz...
A husband who has just cheated on his wife returns home in the early morning, puzzled. He finds there, without knowing it, the lover of his wife, to whom he confesses his infidelity.
Honoré Panisse is dying, cheerfully, with friends, wife, and son at his side. He confesses to the priest in front of his friends; he insists that the doctor be truthful. But, he cannot bring himself to tell his son Césariot that his real father is Marius, the absent son of César, Césariot's godfather. Panisse leaves that to Fanny, the lad's mother. Dissembling that he's off to see a friend, Césariot then seeks Marius, now a mechanic in Toulon. Posing as a journalist, Césariot spends time with Marius and leaves believing tales he is a petty thief. Only after the truth comes out can Marius, Fanny, César, and Césariot step beyond the falsehoods, benign though they may be.
King John IV of Cerdania, who knows monarchs are a vanishing race but who plays his royalty role in state council or boudoir to the hilt, is in Paris to sign a treaty, and becomes enmeshed in intrigue with an actress, Therese Mannix and involved in a bit of cuckoldry with YouYou Bourdier, the ex-seamstress wife of a French senator, who is un-awed by money, power or the King's kisses. For his part, her husband, Senator Bourdier, is glad to use his wealth, wife and collectivist ideals for social position, in spite of his democratic posing.
Tartarin is the local hero in the small provincial town of Tarascon. He shows off about imaginary adventures in Africa, where he has never been, as a Lion Hunter, which he is only in his imagination. Even though the locals know he has never been to Africa, they keep hoping he will leave one day. After a misunderstanding, and much gossip, everyone thinks that Tartarin plans to actually take the trip.
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.
César runs a bar along Marseilles' port, assisted by his 23 year old son, Marius. Colorful characters abound: M. Panisse, an aging widower and prosperous sail maker; Honorine, a fishmonger with a sidewalk stall near the bar; her daughter, Fanny, who helps her sell cockles; and, various old salts. Friends since childhood, Fanny and Marius love each other, but Marius has a secret wanderlust: every ship's whistle stirs a longing for foreign lands. When M. Panisse seeks Fanny's hand in marriage and when a departing clipper needs a deckhand, Marius and Fanny must decide who and what they love most. César, with his generous, comic spirit, tries to guide his son.
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...!
