Word: montand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even those who had never read Camus became familiar with the chain-smoking figure in a trench coat, fatefully evocative of Bogart and Yves Montand. Much was made of his celebrated statement that in a purposeless world the only vital question was one of suicide. His novels The Stranger and The Fall describe souls out of touch with a moral landscape; The Plague watches townspeople succumb to a literal and spiritual disease. It is small wonder that at his death Camus seemed the spokesman of despairing existentialism, a cinematic figure as doom-ridden as any of his characters...
...tries to keep her stolen painting afloat while swimming to shore from a sinking ship, but not nearly as funny as it was when Katherine Hepburn wrestled with her little leopard in Bringing Up Baby. The red gas stove is certainly milked for all its comic absurdity, yet Yves Montand cannot do with it half of what Buster Keaton did with a simple pair of bicycle handlebars in Sherlock Jr. Director Jean Paul Rappeneau seems to understand the basic atmospheric conditions of screwball humor, but he fails to enliven his combination of characters and incidents with any modern twists...
...YVES MONTAND, with his unshaven face and smiling eyes, making a boat motor in the garage or a classic French dinner in the red gas oven, seems remarkably at home in his role. But Deneuve cannot deliver a line or wrinkle up her face in an expression without looking like a spoilt child who can't take no for an answer. The problem lies not so much in her acting ability as it does in the part of Nelly itself...
LOVERS LIKE US brings together Yves Montand, as a brilliant perfumery chemist playing hooky on a Venezuelan island, and Catherine Deneuve, as an ex-nightclub hostess on the lam with a stolen Toulouse-Lautrec. She nearly gets the chemist killed in a highway chase, invades his island and sinks his boat, so naturally he falls in love with her. He locks her out of his house, tries to deport her bodily and finally knocks her out with a pineapple, so naturally she falls in love with him. All this, in the right hands, could make a diverting screwball comedy. These...
...favorable reception of Z in the West, but the movie has a lot more going for it besides. None of Costa-Gavras subsequent tracts has come close to capturing the gut-rending tension that glues the viewer of Z to the edge of his seat. Yves Montand turns in yet another tour de force as the pacifist legislator whose brutal assassination triggers the investigation that inexorably leads to the top layer of the Junta: Bear in mind, however, that no Watergate-style denouement awaits the generals. Irene Pappas' brooding widow adds little to the film; the role limits...