11 June 1933 – 29 August 2016
The actor’s friend and co-star remembers a gentle man whose sensitivity was born from a tough upbringing and a constantly ailing mother
• Alan Rickman remembered by Ian Rickson
• Read the Observer’s obituaries of 2016 in full here
I’ll never forget the first time Gene walked into my house. My God, I thought, it’s Willy Wonka! Gene was working with my then husband, Victor [Drai, a film producer], adapting a French film, Pardon Mon Affaire, which became The Woman in Red (1984). It was my first film. I always say I got the role because I was sleeping with the producer! Gene was the director and the star – and a different, shyer character off camera.
He’d had a tough early life, he’d been abused, and his mother was ill throughout his childhood. He’d always been told to be quiet, sensitive, to make his mother smile. That’s where...
The actor’s friend and co-star remembers a gentle man whose sensitivity was born from a tough upbringing and a constantly ailing mother
• Alan Rickman remembered by Ian Rickson
• Read the Observer’s obituaries of 2016 in full here
I’ll never forget the first time Gene walked into my house. My God, I thought, it’s Willy Wonka! Gene was working with my then husband, Victor [Drai, a film producer], adapting a French film, Pardon Mon Affaire, which became The Woman in Red (1984). It was my first film. I always say I got the role because I was sleeping with the producer! Gene was the director and the star – and a different, shyer character off camera.
He’d had a tough early life, he’d been abused, and his mother was ill throughout his childhood. He’d always been told to be quiet, sensitive, to make his mother smile. That’s where...
- 12/11/2016
- by Guardian Staff
- The Guardian - Film News
Danièle Delorme and Jean Gabin in 'Deadlier Than the Male.' Danièle Delorme movies (See previous post: “Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 Actress Became Rare Woman Director's Muse.”) “Every actor would like to make a movie with Charles Chaplin or René Clair,” Danièle Delorme explains in the filmed interview (ca. 1960) embedded further below, adding that oftentimes it wasn't up to them to decide with whom they would get to work. Yet, although frequently beyond her control, Delorme managed to collaborate with a number of major (mostly French) filmmakers throughout her six-decade movie career. Aside from her Jacqueline Audry films discussed in the previous Danièle Delorme article, below are a few of her most notable efforts – usually playing naive-looking young women of modest means and deceptively inconspicuous sexuality, whose inner character may or may not match their external appearance. Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (“Open for Inventory Causes,” 1946), an unreleased, no-budget comedy notable...
- 12/18/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress and pioneering female film producer. Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress was pioneering woman producer, politically minded 'femme engagée' Danièle Delorme, who died on Oct. 17, '15, at the age of 89 in Paris, is best remembered as the first actress to incarnate Colette's teenage courtesan-to-be Gigi and for playing Jean Rochefort's about-to-be-cuckolded wife in the international box office hit Pardon Mon Affaire. Yet few are aware that Delorme was featured in nearly 60 films – three of which, including Gigi, directed by France's sole major woman filmmaker of the '40s and '50s – in addition to more than 20 stage plays and a dozen television productions in a show business career spanning seven decades. Even fewer realize that Delorme was also a pioneering woman film producer, working in that capacity for more than half a century. Or that she was what in French is called a femme engagée...
- 12/5/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
In 1938 the disturbed 26-year-old John William Warde spent several hours on a 15th-floor ledge of the Gotham hotel in New York before throwing himself down into a Fifth Avenue packed with spectators. In 1948 Joel Sayre wrote a classic New Yorker piece about the incident, "The Man on the Ledge", which in fictionalised form became the 1951 Henry Hathaway film Fourteen Hours starring Richard Basehart as the jumper. Howard Hawks turned down an invitation to direct the film but came up with the notion of Cary Grant playing a philanderer hiding on a ledge from an irate husband and pretending he's a would-be suicide. Grant declined, but Yves Robert borrowed this idea for his comedy Pardon Mon Affaire (1976) starring Jean Rochefort, which Gene Wilder transposed to San Francisco as The Woman in Red (1984).
This all comes back to New York in Man on a Ledge, in which wrongly imprisoned cop Nick Cassidy...
This all comes back to New York in Man on a Ledge, in which wrongly imprisoned cop Nick Cassidy...
- 2/5/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Jacques Doillon’s most recent film—known in English, if it is known at all, as either The Three-Way Wedding or In the Four Winds—has never, to my knowledge, been shown in the States since its release in France in the spring of 2010. According to Jordan Montzer in Variety, Doillon’s “oeuvre reaches new heights of faux-kinky gobbledygook in [this] low-budget chamber piece.... With a pitch that could have provoked untold laughter in the hands of a Larry David, pic somberly reveals the ego-tripping, backstabbing and, well, butt-slapping that occurs when two thesps spend a day at the country home of a misanthropic playwright. What ensues is far from enjoyable, and adequate perfs won’t carry Doillon’s pretentious banter further than French ears.”
That last part may have proved to be right, but I’ve always loved the highly unusual and borderline grotesque poster for the film. I had...
That last part may have proved to be right, but I’ve always loved the highly unusual and borderline grotesque poster for the film. I had...
- 12/16/2011
- MUBI
By warning us in advance that Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise isn't going to save the day, Lars Von Trier's Melancholia joins the fine tradition of films that preview their own coming attractions
There has been much recent discussion about spoilers, but I have yet to see any mention of Films That Spoil Themselves. Lars von Trier's Melancholia begins with the ultimate in spoileresque prologues – the end of the world – before the story backpedals to an earlier date. The foreknowledge changes the way we watch the film – we already know Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise isn't going to step in and save the day – and got me thinking about the reasons some films begin with their very own preview of coming attractions.
Screenwriter Stephen Volk (co-writer of supernatural chiller The Awakening, out next month) says of films that begin with flashforwards: "It is basically to address a change in tone.
There has been much recent discussion about spoilers, but I have yet to see any mention of Films That Spoil Themselves. Lars von Trier's Melancholia begins with the ultimate in spoileresque prologues – the end of the world – before the story backpedals to an earlier date. The foreknowledge changes the way we watch the film – we already know Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise isn't going to step in and save the day – and got me thinking about the reasons some films begin with their very own preview of coming attractions.
Screenwriter Stephen Volk (co-writer of supernatural chiller The Awakening, out next month) says of films that begin with flashforwards: "It is basically to address a change in tone.
- 9/29/2011
- by Anne Billson
- The Guardian - Film News
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