Word: lara
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...plot is a set-up for Fernandel's dolorous humor and his sad, shrewd, ludicrous countenance. Unfortunately, however, director Claude Autant-Lara has given the film a sombre tone which is not congenial to Fernandel's own whimsical, low-pressure style. Autant-Lara sets the mood with a choking death on a dark night (using typically French nonlighting) and the mournful intoning of a balladeer. The horror of death, however, does not stifle Fernandel's humor so much as the flat creatures at the inn. The French comedian seems ill at ease in these dark yet hysterical surroundings...
...gently sends him back to Vinca. In a haystack, the boy and girl fumble at love and, as the summer wanes and they prepare to return to Paris, realize that they have sadly closed the door on childhood. Director Claude Autant-Lara, who covered somewhat the same ticklish territory in Devil in the Flesh (TIME, March 21, 1949), this time has produced not so much a pathetic portrait of adolescence as a melancholy valentine to the memory of those troubling years...
Claude Autant-Lara's Pride is memorable for the curiously objective method used by the director in his examination of a mother and daughter recently driven from a high position to poverty, both too proud to accept the sympathy or help of others. Autant-Lara's camera consciously stays outside his characters, giving the picture a two-dimensional effect that emphasizes the flat drabness to which the women have been reduced. Michele Morgan gives a hauntingly acute performance as the daughter impervious to either kindness or insult, and Francoise Rosay is suitably haughty as the mother...
...outside of a few Spanish-American centers, Lara's songs are little known. Two exceptions: You Belong to My Heart (1943) and Granada, recorded by Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza...