Pour le weekend ...

An Alain Delon tribute, using mainly clips from our perennial favourites PLEIN SOLEIL, L'ECLISSE, LE SAMOURAI ...

Above: Renato Salvatori & Alain in Visconti's ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS; Alain with Monica .... and with Visconti and Claudia on THE LEOPARD.

French gangster flicks

French gangster films of the Fifties and Sixties are often said to be derivative of their American film noirs, but its a genre I can return to happily many times, in the company of directors like Meville and Duvivier, and those players who sum it all up: Gabin, Delon, Belmondo, Hossein,Vidal ...

I particuarly like Henri Verneuil's 1963 MELODIE EN SOUS SOL (or THE BIG SNATCH) where old lag Jean Gabin comes out of prison with one last heist in mind, on a Cannes casino, and hires impulsive, if not reckless, young hotshot Delon to help it. Its taut, tense, the raid goes ok, and then there is that climax at the swimming pool with the bag of swag... 

The daddy of all French heist movies must be Dassin's RIFIFI in 1955, with that long central silent robbery carried out in real time (Dassin did it again, more colourfully in his 1964 TOPKAPI); one of the RIFIFI guys Robert Hossein directed a lot of tense thrillers too, superior B-movies perhaps, but try looking away from  THE WICKED GO TO HELL or  TOI, LE VENIN or UNE MANCHE ET LA BELLE. (Hossein label).   

Jean-Pierre Melville's taut, spare, acerbic thrillers like 1967's LE SAMOURAI (Delon as ice cool killer - see review, Delon label), and his exemplary ARMY OF SHADOWS in 1969 are masterworks, and we like LE CERCLE ROUGE too (Delon, Montand, Ventura) and the delightfully silly THE SICILIAN CLAN where hi-jacking an airliner in flight seems so easy, as Delon and Gabin again team and fall out while seen-it-all cop Ventura is on their trail ....  
  

We also particularly like Duvivier' CHAIR DE POULE (HIGHWAY PICKUP) that jet-black noir from 1963 with hoods Hossein and Jean Sorel (both in their 80s now and still going, as indeed are Delon and Belmondo) fall out over that robbery and a duplicitous dame. Its brilliant: as per: 
http://osullivan60.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/fantastic-french-flick.html

Rene Clement scored here too, as with his masterwork PLEIN SOLEIL and with Delon again in LES FELINS in 1963.  Get a Delon or Belmondo or Melville boxset and enjoy. Malle's LIFT TO THE SCAFFOLD too in 1958 ... while Alain and Belmondo are great fun in BORSALINO (left) in 1970.
Below: Sorel and Hossein in CHAIR DE POULE, 1963 - and, right, in 2015.

Top 20 Desert Island Movies

"Desert Island Movies" don't have to be "masterpieces" or classics (though they can be of course), they are not the Best Movies but simply the movies one enjoys watching and can return to many times (you would have to on a desert island) so no Tarkovsky then, Martin Bradley, or even CITIZEN KANE or history of the cinema items (unless of course you enjoy watching Orson's classic over and over, I like it a lot, but ...). No Trash Classics either, much as we like them one would soon tire of them. Movies then with people one likes spending time with and by directors whose visions we like .... (I have written about these extensively already here, as per labels).

• JOHNNY GUITAR - a favourite western and the first movie I ever saw, aged 8, what a vivid introduction to cinema, I never tire of it. The BFI has it on the cover of their new "Sight & Sound" magazine and it features in their upcoming western retrospective. 
• A STAR IS BORN - another early one I saw as a kid in 1954, its even better now its been restored, the best musical drama ever? I love Cukor's staging of those CinemaScope images in rich Warner-color, and of course Judy and James.
• SOME LIKE IT HOT - for me THE Billy Wilder classic and the still funniest film ever made
  
• THE AWFUL TRUTH - a 30s classic thats a fairly recent discovery
• ALL ABOUT EVE - Mank's script and situations and characters we never tire of
• A LETTER TO 3 WIVES - see above
• THE QUIET MAN - back to that mythical Ireland in Ford's enduring favourite
• THE SEARCHERS - Ford's poetic vision of the West is another enduring favourite
• BLACK NARCISSUS - 2 Michael Powell classics - I sometimes think this and I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING are my top favourite films of all time ..... 
• I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING - I love that mythical highlands, those great characters and its a perfect '40s dreamworld movie. 
• BLOW-UP - maybe still my Number One, on my island I want to re-visit that green park and be back in mid-60s London
• L’AVVENTURA - Monica and Antonioni still fascinate me
• THE LEOPARD - I want the opulence of Visconti's classic and revisit that great ball sequence many times, with that Verdi waltz and Delon and Claudia being impossibly beautiful.
• BARRY LYNDON - this or 2001 ? - hard to decide, but I would get more enjoyment re-visiting this Kubrick classic 
• BRINGING UP BABY - the best of screwball, Hawks, Hepburn and Grant? 
  
• THE SCARLET EMPRESS - we also want the opulence of Josef Von Sternberg - this or Marlene emerging from the gorilla skin in BLOND VENUS or the delirious SHANGHAI EXPRESS?
• THE BANDWAGON - maybe my top favourite musical - endlessly rewatchable,
• THE MISFITS - another movie I used to be obsessed by and can live in.
• NIGHT OF THE IGUANA - another Huston favourite, maybe the best Tennessee Williams, great characters and people I like.
• EL CID - probably my favourite epic, again I can revisit it a lot, even though Sophia dismisses it in her latest book. I remember Chuck towering over me back at the BFI in 1971 ...
  
• Oh, let's have one more, it has to be CASABLANCA - a key Golden Age '40s movie that never goes out of fashion - we will always want to go back to Rick's Cafe Americain with Ingrid, and Sam playing "As Time Goes By" ...

Martin has commanded me to stick to 20, so I am gutted to leave out lots more: there's nothing fairly recent here, not even Scorsese; no '40s noirs, no Garbo or James Dean movies, or other musicals (MEET ME IN ST LOUIS, FUNNY FACE) or dramas I love (ANATOMY OF A MURDER, SEPARATE TABLES), and no Hitchcocks - I could do 10 Hitch classics, but which to decide?, then theres all those Hollywood classics and European stuff I like (PLEIN SOLEIL!), or favourites like LES GIRLS or THE WOMEN and its '56 remake THE OPPOSITE SEX or Vincente's DESIGNING WOMAN or THE LION IN WINTER or THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE Then there are Ingmar Bergman's like AUTUMN SONATA or his enchanting recording of Mozart's THE MAGIC FLUTE - ideal for desert island balmy evenings!  It could be a different list some other day ...

Pour le weekend: '60 European glamour

Does European glamour get better than this?  Soon: '70s and '80s glamour ...

Some of our '60s European favourites: Alain with Marie Laforet, Romy, Monica, Claudia, Deneuve & Dorleac, Anouk, Audran, Belmondo, Vitti & Stamp in MODESTY BLAISE, Jean Sorel & Robert Hossein in that terrific thriller CHAIR DE POULE, 1963, (both in their 80s now, as are Loren, Delon, Bardot, Aimee, Belmondo etc), Brigitte avec Laurent Terzieff in Scotland for TWO WEEKS IN SEPTEMBER, a 1967 cult favourite, and Sophia with that kinky boots moment in ARABESQUE ! Lots more on all these at their labels.

Star, 80

The latest addition to the 80s club - Alain Delon - 80 yesterday, joining Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot and the rest. We have used this photo of Alain before - from Clement's 1963 LES FELINS. It may be time to see PLEIN SOLEIL again .... lots more Alain at label. 

I might have to invest in the new Blu-ray of L'ECLISSE for those perfect black and white images and Antonioni landscapes ... Methinks 80 is the new 70 ...

Delon & Laforet, again

And to round off this session on 1960s French glamour, here once again are some terrific stills of Alain Delon and Marie Laforet in Rene Clement's PLEIN SOLEIL from Patricia Highsmith's THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY .... feel the heat of the mediterranean ...

A new Mr Ripley at 60, plus Carol too ...

Tom Ripley is 60 – he first appeared in 1955 in Patricia Highsmith’s novel THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY. I had a Pan paperback edition when I was a teenager, circa 1962, and a few editions since, but I just had to get this new 60^th anniversary hardback, from Virago, a handsome volume for the bookshelf, with new introduction, etc. Its a book I love re-reading. Highsmith's lucid prose draws one in from the first sentence. 

We like Ripley – and his Alain Delon incarnation a lot, here at the Projector – as per the labels. Rene Clement’s 1960 film PLEIN SOLEIL, shot in 1959, captures that high end Mediterranean glamour perfectly, and entranced me when I was 14. I did not relate to the 1999 film much at all, as Anthony Minghella expanded and changed the characters and the ‘50s fashions were too fussy and overdone – back in the 1959 film they – Delon, Marie Laforet, Maurice Ronet – looks very smart casual wearing clothes that still work now.  The book, too, is surprisingly frank for one written in the mid-'50s about Tom and the gay milieu he lived in New York (it starts with Tom sharing a grotty room with an obviously gay window dresser who is putting Tom up for a while, before Mr Greenleaf sends him to Italy ...), before more erotic frissons in Italy. Back in the Fifties, before mass air travel, a trip to Europe on an ocean liner was a treat indeed - by page 50 Tom has left seedy New York behind and arrives in that Italian village ...

Reading the book again one realises how easy it must have been to impersonate someone else back in that pre-internet world without computers, the risk of being photographed on cellphones or on constant CCTV ... 

Its shaping up to a Highsmith year, with Todd Haynes’ film of CAROL finally coming out of the traps, after very positive reviews at Cannes recently. If its half as good as his FAR FROM HEAVEN ….

I have just read her novel CAROL, here is the blurb:

Therese is just an ordinary sales assistant working in a New York department store just before Christmas when a beautiful, alluring woman in her thirties walks up to her counter. Standing there, Therese is wholly unprepared for the first shock of love. Therese is an awkward 19 year old with a job she hates and a boyfriend she doesn’t love; Carol is a sophisticated, bored suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce and a custody battle for her only daughter. As Therese becomes irresistibly drawn into Carol’s world, she soon realizes how much they both stand to lose …

First published pseudonymously in 1952 as THE PRICE OF SALT, CAROL is a hauntingly atmospheric love story set against the backdrop of Fifties New York. 

It was a bit hit at the time, the first lesbian love story with a happy ending …. As Highsmith says in the Afterword at the end. The thriller element comes into force too as the women realise they are being followed on their extended car trip and decide to confront the detective, and Carol has a gun ...

THE TALENTER MR RIPLEY also begins in Fifties New York with jittery Tom trying to evade that man who is following him through the bars of that gay milieu he inhabits – he thinks it is one of his shady deals coming apart but he turns out to be the father of Dickie Greenleaf, setting that plot in motion ….

Cate Blanchett, whom one imagines is the perfect Carol as one reads the book, was also of course in Mingella’s 1999 film of MR RIPLEY – one of her first eye-catching roles. Now she is finally leading CAROL (it was filmed last year, but does not open until this November) into the next award season … no doubt, a cunning Weinstein strategy. 

The Ripleys again: Matt or Alain?

We had to have another look at THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY on television once again, the other day, despite rushing to it when released in 1999 and seen it several times since. It is Anthony Minghella's glossy adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's classic novel and is an engaging, if hollow, thriller in bright Italian sunshine. Minghella though, as per his published screenplay, greatly expands on the novel fleshing out characters, played by Cate Blanchett and Jack Davenport, who are barely mentioned by Highsmith. Cate is rich girl Meredith, while Jack is Ripley's new love - whom he has to get rid of in order to continue his duplicitous new life. 

We note also how Dickie is made more of a heel - getting that local girl pregnant and his indifference when she drowns herself - so presumably we the audience do not feel too bad when he is bumped off - but of course Jude Law is so charismatic here the film drifts once he is not there to tease and taunt Matt Damon's nerdy needy Tom. So its an overlong, drawn out affair as our glamorous people act out Highsmith's chilling tale. Philip Seymour Hoffman scores too in that key small role

What sinks it for me is the trowelled-on Fifties period detail - all those fussy '50s fashions they wear, with hats and gloves. Whereas in Rene Clement's PLEIN SOLEIL, the 1959 original, they were smart casual clothes that would still be fashionable now, they look strikingly modern in fact - and 24 year old Alain Delon, stunnng Marie Laforet and Maurice Ronet as Dickie are all perfectly right. Its a shorter tale, and even with that changed ending, it works better. Delon in that ice blue suit strolling around the market, and Marie Laforet as Marge strumming that guitar surrounded by her Fra Angelico prints, and the tensions of the three of them on the boat, and of course Dickie suddenly realising he is in danger after pushing Tom too far ... all set on the real mediterranean of 1959 as captured by Henri Decae's glowing colours. 

I have written a lot about PLEIN SOLEIL here, see the labels below, It is of course the tale of how New York wannabe Tom Ripley's life changes after he is sent to Italy to haul back errant playboy Dickie Greenleaf. In the 1999 version Matt Damon makes Ripley suitably sinister and needy and Jude Law is at his charismatic best as the wastrel rich boy whom Ripley wants for himself or failing that to be him, taking over his life ...just as Delon and Ronet played it in 1959.
I first saw that version when 14 in 1960, when it opened my eyes to European glamour and beauty. Its a seminal movie for me. as much as 2001, BLOW-UP, or LA NOTTE BRAVA, SANDRA, MODESTY BLAISE, WHATS NEW PUSSYCAT? etc. but THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY is fascinating too.