A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, October 22, 2018

Martin Roumagnac (Georges Lacombe, 1946)

Watched 10/6/2018
Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin in Martin Roumagnac
Blanche Ferrand: Marlene Dietrich
Martin Roumagnac: Jean Gabin
Blanche's Uncle: Jean d'Yd
The Schoolteacher: Daniel Gélin
The Defense Attorney: Jean Darcante
Jeanne Roumagnac: Margo Lion
Laubry: Marcel Herrand

Director: Georges Lacombe
Screenplay: Pierre Véry, Georges Lacombe
Based on a novel by Pierre-René Wolf
Cinematography: Roger Hubert
Production design: Georges Wakhévitch
Film editing: Germaine Artus
Music: Marcel Mirouze

This overheated and forgettable melodrama should have been better, given that Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin were lovers and were both making their postwar returns to European filmmaking. It's watchable but mainly for Dietrich, who was trying to overcome her old image as a Hollywood diva and allows herself to be filmed in natural light for once, and for a mad courtroom scene featuring a defense lawyer who behaves like a Daumier caricature. Gabin grumps about in a role that would have been better if he and Dietrich had the kind of on-screen chemistry that they supposedly had off-screen.
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