Word: parisian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Rags to Bitchery. Lamiel was to begin her life in an orphanage, become a Parisian courtesan, marry a duke, and die the mistress of a robber-chief. From autumn 1839 to spring 1842 Stendhal sketched the outline of her progress from rags to riches. He described her adoption by a childless couple, her entry as a servant-companion into the household of a duchess, her initiation into the facts of upper-class life, i.e., mingled boredom, bitchery, fear and arrogance. He did portraits of varying completeness of the men in her life, ranging from a Machiavellian, hunchbacked doctor...
This French pastry has been served up with a rich helping of Technicolored spectacle as well as a good bit of overly rich dialogue and direction. The action includes a number of chases on horseback and a spectacular dueling scene in a candlelit Parisian theater, with Ferrer and Granger bounding from balcony boxes to backstage. Ferrer makes a smartly menacing Marquis, and Granger is a fine, swashbuckling figure, although he suggests little of that "gift of laughter" of which Sabatini wrote. Also on hand, in a minor role: Lewis Stone, now 72, who played the villainous Marquis to Ramon Novarro...
...existentialists said that, since nothing really mattered very much, everything mattered. Since life was too utterly futile, everybody ought to live it to the hilt. "It is absurd for us to be born," proclaimed existentialism's protector, Jean-Paul Sartre. "It is absurd for us to die." For Parisian intellectuals, desperately in quest of an interesting pose, this was the ticket...
...suppose, inevitable that Singin' in the Rain be compared with Kelly's last vehicle, An American in Paris. It seemed to me that the latter film had the better ballet sequence, a good male singing voice in Georges Guetary, and a certain Continental charm absorbed from the Parisian locale...
...interior shots are filmed in the Stockholm studios, but Reynolds makes periodic tours of the Continent, setting up his camera for exteriors of Parisian boulevards, Viennese squares, Berlin freight yards. He often shoots unscheduled scenes (e.g., Actor Thor bursting out of an ornate doorway and running up an architecturally impressive street, or Actress Scott dodging through the ruins of Hamburg) and then writes them into future plots...