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Olivia At The Laemmle Royal | 11523 Santa Monica Blvd.

Already underway and screening daily through Sept. 5 at the Laemmle Royal is a new digital restoration of Jacqueline Audry’s trailblazing 1951 feature Olivia, one of the first films, French or otherwise, to deal with female homosexuality. Set in a 19th-century Parisian finishing school for girls, the film depicts the struggle between two head mistresses (Edwige Feuillere and Simone Simon) for the affection of their students, and how one girl’s (Marie-Claire Olivia) romantic urges stir jealousy in the house. Audry, one of the key female filmmakers of post-World War II France,...

Olivia At The Laemmle Royal | 11523 Santa Monica Blvd.

Already underway and screening daily through Sept. 5 at the Laemmle Royal is a new digital restoration of Jacqueline Audry’s trailblazing 1951 feature Olivia, one of the first films, French or otherwise, to deal with female homosexuality. Set in a 19th-century Parisian finishing school for girls, the film depicts the struggle between two head mistresses (Edwige Feuillere and Simone Simon) for the affection of their students, and how one girl’s (Marie-Claire Olivia) romantic urges stir jealousy in the house. Audry, one of the key female filmmakers of post-World War II France,...

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...

Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...