Word: autant
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Enough Rope. In a proper French suspense thriller, the question is less likely to be whodunit than who'll-be-undone-by-it. Here, nearly every member of a fine, worried cast is slowly undone when Veteran Director Claude Autant-Lara (Devil in the Flesh) begins to philosophize on film about the complex, overlapping nature of guilt. Putting the squeeze on a crafty plot from a novel by Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train), Autant-Lara seemingly distills a number of small, disturbing revelations and holds each one up to the light, testing for color, clarity and body...
...Mare (Zenith-International) is what happens when the French take another whack at Fanny. Like that famously funny film first made by Marcel Pagnol, The Green Mare is a comedy of barnyard humors adapted from a ribald but rusé ironic novel by Marcel Aymé. Regrettably, Director Claude Autant-Lara lacks both Pagnol's touch and Aymé's intensity. The Green Mare ain't what she used to be. Nevertheless she is, as the French say, green-which means, as the Americans say, blue. The plot, for example, involves a Rabelaisian family feud in which...
There is no good reason to slip on down to the Brattle this week; any book would be easier going. The Red and the Black deals exam period diversion a death blow. Claude Autant-Lara has allowed himself to be carried away with the pathetic figure of a poor downtrodden peasant of the French Empire. He fails to recall that Stendahl saw Julien Sorel's answer to constricting French society as understandable, but not laudable. Sorel is no hero of the poor, he is simply the unfortunate...
...Topnotch Whodunit Writer Georges Simenon furnished the novel (En Cas de Malheur) on which the film is based. Jean Gabin was hired to top the title. Actress Bardot was signed to bring up the rear in the box-office battle. And the slickest of the big French directors, Claude Autant-Lara (Devil in the Flesh, Rouge et Noir), has contrived to combine all these expensive, volatile elements into a smutty story that is technically very well told...
...obstacle course lined with gendarmes, prostitutes, Nazi soldiers, informers and other keen-nosed dogs. Only the Gallic touch could make such a dangerous journey seem so funny and so sad at the same time. The mishaps that befall the pair have a wonderfully impromptu quality, as if Director Claude Autant-Lara, occasionally glancing at the story (by Marcel Ayme) from which the movie is loosely taken, made up most of the pratfalls and hairbreadth escapes as he went along...