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Marie Dubois, actress in French New Wave films, dead at 77 (image: Marie Dubois in the mammoth blockbuster 'La Grande Vadrouille') Actress Marie Dubois, a popular French New Wave personality of the '60s and the leading lady in one of France's biggest box-office hits in history, died Wednesday, October 15, 2014, at a nursing home in Lescar, a suburb of the southwestern French town of Pau, not far from the Spanish border. Dubois, who had been living in the Pau area since 2010, was 77. For decades she had been battling multiple sclerosis, which later in life had her confined to a wheelchair. Born Claudine Huzé (Claudine Lucie Pauline Huzé according to some online sources) on January 12, 1937, in Paris, the blue-eyed, blonde Marie Dubois began her show business career on stage, being featured in plays such as Molière's The Misanthrope and Arthur Miller's The Crucible. François Truffaut discovery: 'Shoot the...

Your Weekly Source for the Newest Releases to Blu-Ray Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

Boccaccio ’70 (1962)

Synopsis: Four legendary filmmakers direct some of Europe’s biggest stars in Boccaccio ’70, a landmark anthology film. Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street), Federico Fellini (8½), Luchino Visconti (The Leopard) and Vittorio De Sica (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) direct Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg, Romy Schneider and more through four stories of unashamed eros. Modeled on Boccaccio’s Decameron, they are comic moral tales about the hypocrisies surrounding sex in 1960s Italy. Monicelli’s “Renzo e Luciana” (cut out of the original American release) is a frothy tale of young love and office politics in the big city. Fellini’s notorious “Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio” features Ekberg as a busty model in a milk advertisement whose image begins to haunt an aging prude. Visconti’s “Il Lavoro” stars Romy Schneider as a trophy wife enduring her husband’s very public affairs,...

One of the interesting things about David Goodis’s career, Steve Seid mentioned by way of introduction to François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), is that—even though Goodis’s first connection to filmmaking occurred in 1947 with Dark Passage and The Unfaithful—attempts to adapt his work have continued to the present day; Seid recently met someone working with Goodis’s 1951 novel Cassidy’s Girl. Along the way, going all the way back to 1954-1955, the French have been particularly attracted to Goodis’s novels and—of the twelve existing feature adaptations—eight have their roots in French filmmaking.

The earliest was Pierre Chenals’ Section des disparus made in Argentina during the mid-50s, continuing on with Henri Verneuil’s Le Casse (The Burglars, 1971), René Clement’s La Course du Lièvre à Travers Les Champs (And Hope To Die, 1972), Jean-Jacques Beineix’s La Lune Dans...