Word: montand
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...Sleeping Car Murder is only the first of the multiple killings in this straightforward French thriller. A sultry perfume saleswoman is strangled in a six-person compartment aboard the Marseille-Paris express, and several of her companions are dead before Police Inspector Yves Montand corners the killer for the traditional wrap-up of clues, motives and revelations...
Murder follows a heavily signposted route, but its cast has esprit to spare. As usual, Simone Signoret leaves a tingle in the air, though she is done in when the plot is only half unraveled. Preternaturally sensitive to the supreme folly of being human, Simone (Mme. Montand in private life) plays a third-rate actress who mocks herself as "an overripe hag out for a good time" with a young student (Jean-Louis Trin-tignant). She feels guilty about nothing until she has to confess that even a woman of distinction must sometimes travel in a crowded second-class compartment...
...dawns, it dies. C'est fini, he cries, with desolate finality. You've Let Yourself Go is an unsparing plaint of conjugal disenchantment. Aznavour has none of the rakish charm of Maurice Chevalier, the ebullient high spirits of Charles Trenet, or the blatant sex appeal of Yves Montand. But he has two qualities that none of them possess with the same intensity-fire and sorrow. He was trained by Edith Piaf, and if one closes one's eyes, one can hear her pain as well as her phrasing in his voice. Aznavour's notes are wounds...
...another have popped to the top of the hit parade in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Rumania and Switzerland. At her home base, Paris, where the tousled blonde is possessively known as "La Petulante Petula," she has collected the Grand Prix du Disque (just like Edith Piaf and Yves Montand before her), and earlier this year got the Bravos du Music Hall, France's annual award to the female show-business success of the year...
After dinner, Malraux gave a lofty address en art to the guests, who included James Baldwin, James Johnson Sweeney, Poet Saint-John Perse, Baron Alain de Rothschild, Mmes. Kandinsky and Léger, Ludmilla Tcherina, Yves Montand and Ella Fitzgerald. He called the museum "an important step in the history of the spirit" and concluded: "It was on a night like this that we heard the last blow of the hammer that completed the Parthenon. It was on a night like this that sounded the last blow of the hammer to Michelangelo's St. Peter's." -Yves Montand...