News

Mediawan-owned Storia Television is teaming up with French public broadcaster France Televisions on “Et la montagne fleurira,” an ambitious period drama which starts to shoot today, May 19, on the French Riviera.

Eléonore Faucher, whose feature debut “A Common Thread” won Cannes’ Critics’ Week in 2004, wrote and directs the series. Faucher most recently helmed the crime mystery “La Maladroite” with Isabelle Carré (“De Gaulle”) and Émilie Dequenne (“Love Affair(s)).”

Based on Françoise Bourdon’s novel “La Mas des Tilleuls,” the series is a six-part family saga set in 1837 in Provence and follows a man, Jean-Baptiste, who was banned from this childhood home by his father after being wrongfully accused of having abused his step mother, Seraphine. Jean-Baptiste runs away to live with his aunt and eventually become a merchant of rare flowers and finds love with Lila. But his happiness is crushed when a revolt spreads across Provence, forcing him...

A cinematic puzzle and a filmic detective piece, Serge Bromberg’s examination of a world-class filmmaker’s catastrophic, never-finished production fascinates and dazzles. If the particulars of H.G. Clouzot’s experimental epic of internal torment remain clouded, the astonishing visuals he created are a total knockout. Working with hours of uncut dailies and precise collaborator memories, Bromberg gives us the most interesting filmic autopsy on record. Incredible stuff!

Inferno

(L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot)

Blu-ray

Arrow Academy

2009 / Color & B&W / 1:78 widescreen / 100 min. / L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot / Street Date February 6, 2018 / Available from Arrow Video 34.95

Starring: Romy Schneider, Serge Reggiani, Bérénice Bejo, Jacques Gamblin, Dany Carrel, Jean-Claude Bercq, Mario David, Catherine Allégret, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Gilbert Amy, Jacques Douy, Jean-Louis Ducarme, Costa-Gavras, William Lubtchansky, Thi Lan Nguyen, Joël Stein, Bernard Stora, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Bernard Blier, Inès Clouzot, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Lino Ventura, Burt Lancaster.

Cinematography: Jérôme Krumenacker, Irina Lubtchansky...

Marc Allégret: From André Gide lover to Simone Simon mentor (photo: Marc Allégret) (See previous post: "Simone Simon Remembered: Sex Kitten and Femme Fatale.") Simone Simon became a film star following the international critical and financial success of the 1934 romantic drama Lac aux Dames, directed by her self-appointed mentor – and alleged lover – Marc Allégret.[1] The son of an evangelical missionary, Marc Allégret (born on December 22, 1900, in Basel, Switzerland) was to have become a lawyer. At age 16, his life took a different path as a result of his romantic involvement – and elopement to London – with his mentor and later "adoptive uncle" André Gide (1947 Nobel Prize winner in Literature), more than 30 years his senior and married to Madeleine Rondeaux for more than two decades. In various forms – including a threesome with painter Théo Van Rysselberghe's daughter Elisabeth – the Allégret-Gide relationship remained steady until the late '20s and their trip to...