When the men of a Sicilian village start obsessing over ravishing blonde midwife Jessica, angry females revolt by refusing to have sex with their husbands. As the local priest tries to encourage procreation, Jessica falls for a tricky recluse.

A French agent goes after a gang of Asian terrorists who plan to blow up an American nuclear aircraft carrier.

Henri, the Man from Nantes, comes back to his country after a successful stay in the United States, where he was working for Liski, the drug dealer. With the fame of being a tough guy preceding him, he sets himself to the task of knowing why the French operations were not so profitable - and soon he is master of all links of the organization. He can now get it honed to perfection - or destroy it. Only... the Police are following his every step.

De drôles de personnages hauts en couleur débarquent dans le petit village français de Corecheux...

In this fast-paced remake of the Maurice Chevalier vehicle Folies Bergère, talented Danny Kaye plays both a performer and a heroic French military pilot.

In this complex chronicle of the evolution of a provincial family's life, the story follows three generations of at least two neighboring families from the 1890s to the 1970s. In one of many related tales, a man who was engaged to the older daughter of a farmer elopes with the younger one. After many years and the birth of five children, the man leaves his wife and family for the bright lights of the city but continues turning up from time to time, until he is finally taken into the home of one of his sons when he is a quite old man. The complex interactions of the legitimate and illegitimate children of a womanizing miner give rise to yet another set of related stories.

A violinist and his brother guide one's son through his crush on the family maid in 1920s Ottawa.

A woman must steal a statue from a Paris museum to help conceal her father's art forgeries.

1973 film by Pierre-Alain Jolivet

A group of Nazis and sympathizers board a submarine bound for South America in the hopes of finding shelter.

The great French actor, Marcel Dalio, who has the lead role in Jean Renoir's THE RULES OF THE GAME, also appears in Renoir's GRAND ILLUSION. In both films he plays a character who is Jewish, as Dalio was in real life. In fact, in most of the French films he's in the 1930s, he almost always plays shady characters, informers, blackmailers and gangsters. In other words, he is always "the Jew." When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he fled to America and appeared in CASABLANCA and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. In America, he was no longer the Jew but The Frenchman. He became, in dozens of films, America's idea of a typical Frenchman. His film career has these two strands in which he has two different identities. Are you defined by other people and their perceptions of who you are? Are you always a creation of the way people want to see you? Or can you exist outside of the arbitrary boundaries which are placed on you? Written by Fandor

A Parisian nightclub owner known for her performances of the can-can attracts the ire of a self-righteous judge. He hatches a plot to photograph her in the act but ends up falling for her — much to the chagrin of her lawyer boyfriend.

1952 film by Curtis Bernhardt

Originally titled Les Perles de Couronne, this Sacha Guitry historical extravaganza stars both Guitry and his wife Jacqueline Delubac. The plotline hinges on four valuable pearls, which pass from hand to hand over a period of several centuries, from the time of Britain's Henry VIII to the present. All of this is offered in flashback form, as a group of modern-day treasure hunters try to locate three of the missing pearls by tracing them back to their previous owners. Guitry shows up as King Francis I, Barras and Napoleon III, in addition to his contemporary persona of Jean Martin; Debulac is seen as Mary Queen of Scots and Empress Josephine. There isn't a scintilla of historical accuracy in the film, nor did Guitry have the slightest intention of including any; his sole purpose was to entertain the audience and serve up a superbly ironic denoument. The supporting cast is a polyglot of French, English and Italian actors, each speaking in his or her own language. The screenplay for Pearls of the Crown was cowritten by Guitry and another immensely talented filmmaker, Christian-Jaque. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Antoine was raised into the easy life by his very rich grandfather. After the death of his grandfather the money has gone and Antoine falls under the influence of various easy people.

At the start of the First World War, Marthe Richard sees her parents arrested by German soldiers, taken away and shot. When she loses contact with her fiancé, André, a soldier on the Western Front, the young woman hastens to Paris with one thought in her mind – to take revenge on the Germans by serving her country. She is engaged by Commandant Rémond to work as a spy. She is sent to Saint-Sébastien in Spain to make contact with two senior German officers, von Ludow and von Falken. Von Ludow is easily seduced by Marthe’s charms and offers her work as a spy. Having gained the confidence of her enemies, Marthe stands every chance of fulfilling her mission, to determine the whereabouts of a hidden submarine base. However, von Ludow’s mistress, Mata Hari, sees Marthe as a rival and sets out to thwart her mission...
Marthe Richard au service de la France is one of three films by director Raymond Bernard which were set at the time of the First World War. The other two were: Les Croix de bois (1932) and Les Otages (1938). The film is based on the memoirs of Marthe Richard who, as a young woman, worked as a spy for the French during WWI. Richard would later became a leading campaigner against prostitution in France, a staunch supporter of the law that would result in the closure of brothels in 1946.
The main attraction of this film is its cast. The part of Marthe Richard is played by Edwige Feuillère, an engaging and very talented actress who was one of the stars of French cinema in the 1930s and 1940s. Her co-star is the impressive Erich von Stroheim, who had established himself as an actor in Hollywood after an inspired but largely unsuccessful career as a film director. This was the first of around half a dozen French films which von Stroheim starred in before his return to the United States at the start of World War II. It was immediately followed by La Grande illusion, in which von Stroheim again plays a German officer during WWI, arguably the actor’s most memorable film role. At the time, von Stroheim could not speak French and had to learn his lines phonetically, but that did not prevent him from giving a powerful, intensely human performance.
Unlike most of Raymond Bernard’s films, Marthe Richard au service de la France has not aged well. This is partly to do with the quality of the special effects – the air-sea battle sequence at the end of the film was clearly too ambitious to be realised convincingly with the available resources and looks risible compared with comparable Hollywood offerings of the period. However, what most dates the film is its flagrant appeal to nationalism. In contrast to Bernard’s earlier WWI film (the excellent Les Croix de bois), it shows a grotesquely idealised view of war, with John Buchan-style heroes, bloodless conflict and no end of flag-waving crowds. Obviously, the film was an appeal to patriotism as a time when war in Europe looked imminent, when a more realistic approach would have been a much harder sell. It is interesting to compare this with Bernard’s next film, Les Otages, also set during World War I. Whilst this later film also takes a patriotic line, it does so in a far more subtle way, whilst giving a more honest and convincing portrayal of the horrors of war.
One of the main themes of Marthe Richard au service de la France is the question of identity, of people not realising who the real enemy is during a period of crisis. Bernard seems to be strangely prescient of the problems that would beset the French nation when it fell under German occupation in the early 1940s, a time when no one could know for certain who was a collaborator or who was a resistance supporter, a time when persecuted minorities and free-thinkers had to conceal their identities or face deportation to the Nazi death camps. This would provide the subject for Raymond Bernard’s Un ami viendra ce soir (1946), the first film he made after a period of obscurity during the Second World War, one of his darkest and most interesting films. ~ James [email protected]

The film consists of seven roughly 15 minute episodes, each showing what will happen if one or more of the Ten Commandments will be broken: Jérome Chambard is warned that he will lose his job if he continues to swear; Françoise Beaufort enamored of a stripper calls on her only to find her married to a janitor who doesn't know what kind of dancing his wife performs; Denis, a Jesuit novice, leaves the order to avenge his sister's suicide, which was provoked by Garigny, who seduced her into prostitution and drug addiction; Philip buys a necklace for Micheline though he is bored with her; a young man find out that his real mother is not Madeleine, but actress Clarisse Ardant; Didier Marin, cashier of a bank, was fired by his boss; the Devil appears as a serpent for Jérome Chambard and the bishop are eating.

In this riot of frantic disguises and mistaken identities, Victor Pivert, a blustering, bigoted French factory owner, finds himself taken hostage by Slimane, an Arab rebel leader. The two dress up as rabbis as they try to elude not only assasins from Slimane's country, but also the police, who think Pivert is a murderer. Pivert ends up posing as Rabbi Jacob, a beloved figure who's returned to France for his first visit after 30 years in the United States. Adding to the confusion are Pivert's dentist-wife, who thinks her husband is leaving her for another woman, their daughter, who's about to get married, and a Parisian neighborhood filled with people eager to celebrate the return of Rabbi Jacob.