Les Grandes Manoeuvres (René Clair, 1955)

Gérard Philipe and Michèle Morgan in Les Grandes Manoeuvres

Marie-Louise Rivière: Michèle Morgan
Armand de la Verne: Gérard Philipe
Victor Duverger: Jean Desailly
Félix Leroy: Yves Robert
Lucie: Brigitte Bardot
The Colonel: Pierre Dux
Armand's Orderly: Jacques Fabbri

Director: René Clair
Screenplay: René Clair, Jérôme Géronimi, Jean Marsan
Cinematography: Robert Lefebvre
Production design: Léon Barsacq
Film editing: Louisette Hautecoeur, Denise Natot
Music: Georges Van Parys

René Clair's first film in color is a pretty pastel confection set in a French village at the end of the 19th century, a period many French filmmakers were drawn to in part because it held a kind of autumnal glow before the harsh winter that would set in during the second decade of the 20th century. A handsome womanizing lieutenant, Armand de la Verne, stationed in the village before the beginning of the army's summer maneuvers, wagers that he can seduce the first woman to enter the room. She happens to be Marie-Louise Rivière, a divorcée who has opened a millinery in the village. And they happen to be played by Gèrard Philipe and Michèle Morgan, two of the biggest French stars of the day, both of them in middle age and endowed with a kind of gravitas that means the movie is not going to be a frivolous sex farce. For sexiness, we have a parallel flirtation between another lieutenant, Félix Leroy, and the saucy young Lucie, played by the saucy young Brigitte Bardot. Yet the film is weighed down by the more mature couple, to the point that Clair's romantic nostalgia never quite comes off the screen and engages the audience. It's lovely to look at, and it has admirers who defend its bittersweet tone, but it feels to me more like an exercise in period filmmaking than a fully committed work -- even though it was one of Clair's favorite films.

French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955)

Henri Danglard: Jean Gabin
Nini: Françoise Arnoul
Lola: Maria Félix
Esther Georges: Anna Amendola
Baron Walter: Jean-Roger Caussimon
La Génisse: Dora Doll
Prince Alexandre: Giani Esposito
Oscar: Gaston Gabaroche
Bidon: Jacques Jouanneau
Coudrier: Jean Parédès
Paulo: Franco Pastorino
Eleonore: Michèle Philippe
Le Capitaine Valorgueil: Michel Piccoli
Eugénie Buffet: Édith Piaf
Yvette Guilbert: Patachou

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir
Cinematography: Michel Kelber
Production design: Max Douy
Film editing: Boris Lewin
Music: Georges Van Parys
Costume design: Rosine Delamare

The Moulin Rouge is a kind of metonymy for the Parisian Belle Époque, that period of French culture that forms the core of Marcel Proust's fiction and represents an efflorescence of the arts before the disaster of World War I, which is why the cabaret has been the setting of so many movies, including at least half a dozen that bear its name in the title. So it's entirely fitting that Jean Renoir, whose father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was so prominent a figure in the Belle Époque, should have chosen the Moulin Rouge as the setting for a film that marked his return to working in France after an exile that began in 1940. The central story of French Cancan is bogus: The Moulin Rouge was not founded by Henri Danglard, who is a made-up figure. But since he's played by Jean Gabin, the greatest of French movie stars, it doesn't really matter. Gabin gives a solidity to the character that few actors can muster. It's a lavish, riotously colorful movie, a heavily fictionalized treatment of the founding of the nightclub, and one of the best film musicals ever made. It's also a celebration of a certain kind of French insouciance about sex, a gleeful nose-thumbing at puritan moralizers.

Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

Diabolique (or Les Diaboliques) was probably one of the first foreign language films I ever saw (although I'm sure I must have seen it in a version dubbed into English, as most U.S. releases were back then). The only thing I retained from it, I'm afraid, is the surprise ending. So I'm glad to say that it holds up after all these years, as any good thriller must even when you know its twists. I am, for the record, not one who is spoiled by "spoilers": I knew the gimmick in The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) before I saw it, and I like to think I appreciated it more because I could see how it was being set up, and I enjoyed The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) more the second time I watched it. To my mind, any good thriller with a twist has to work independently of that twist, which Diabolique does. What it has going for it especially is Clouzot's superb control of atmosphere: sets (Léon Barsacq), music (Georges Van Parys), cinematography (Armand Thirard), and of course the performances of Véra Clouzot as Christina, Simone Signoret as Nicole, Paul Meurisse as Michel, Charles Vanel as Fichet, and a gallery of mildly grotesque supporting players, all working together to create a thoroughly sordid and unpleasant but also hypnotizing milieu. Even before the murder takes place, I was seriously creeped out by the shabby old school, its rowdy boys and ratty staff, and the sadism displayed by Michel toward his wife and mistress. That said, the story doesn't entirely hold together in any dispassionate post-viewing analysis. Without giving away any of the film's secrets, I spotted numerous loose threads. To name one, why is Christina so insistent on not divorcing Michel when she's perfectly willing to go along with a plot to murder him? We are expected to believe that she's a devout Catholic with religious scruples against divorce, but surely the church is at least as much against murdering your husband as it is against divorcing him. But I'm perfectly happy to ignore the implausible when the movie is as gripping as this one is.