Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
French Cancan: Marvelous, 9 Jul 2007
French Cancan, one of three Renoir films packaged by Criterion as Stage and Spectacle, is a marvelous movie. The story is simple but the execution is amazing. A Belle Epoque impresario, down on his financial luck, is going to open a new club, the Moulin Rouge, with a new dance, the French cancan. He encounters a working girl and makes her a dancer. She'll become a star. There are several crises to overcome before that happens.
The movie is Jean Renoir's tribute to show business, and he puts it on the screen with color, verve, humor, and humanity. There are wonderful performances by all the actors. The leads are Jean Gabin as Henri Danglard, the impresario; Francoise Arnoul as Nini, the girl who'll become a star; and Maria Felix as Lola de Castro, an overwhelmingly tempestuous beauty and Danglard's lover at the start. Gabin exudes confidence, worldly humor and dedication to show business. He even dances a bit. Arnoul is first rate, too. It looks like she was doing her own dances, and as an actress think of a young Leslie Caron with brains and charm.
The climax of the movie is the opening of the club, with Felix's star dance, comic songs, a whistler, a Danglar-discovered singer, all moving toward the introduction of the French cancan. The crises happen and are resolved. Then the cancan explodes. Dancing girls come bursting out from the stage, the front of the theater, through posters, down ropes from the balcony. The house swirls with the black tie and tails of the swells and the garish colors of the dancers' gowns. The cancan number lasts probably ten or fifteen minutes or so, all music and gaiety, all high kicks and splits. It's amazing when row after row of the dancers, moving toward the camera through the audience, leap up, legs extended straight foward and backward, backs arched, then land on the dance floor in full splits. I didn't know whether to shout or wince.
The last scene of the movie is outside the club, shot from the cobblestone street looking at the entrance. It's a medium shot and from the side street a happy, inebriated fellow in black tie and top hat staggers across, pauses to tip his hat at the camera, then staggers off. A completely charming ending.
This really is a marvelous movie. Peter Bogdanovich has a good filmed interview. He usually puts me off with the ego, the ascot and the dyed hair. But he does know movies, and his insights into Renoir and this movie are good. There are several extras, and the DVD transfer is first rate.
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The Golden Coach: What a charming movie. I started smiling at the opening curtain and the good feeling lasted to the end. The dialogue is often amusingly worldly with an epigrammatic style. The look of the movie is so lush and theatrical. And Anna Magnani is a powerhouse as Camilla. One critic said that watching one after the other of The Golden Coach, French Cancan and Elena and Her Men, the three movies in the Criterion Renoir pack, would create a sensory overload. He's right, I think. But taking each at a leisurely pace is proving very rewarding. The theater is life, Renoir says, and he's proving it in these three movies.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Major, A Minor and a Masterpiece, 7 Jun 2007
Beautiful Criterion collection of Renoir's loose colour trilogy from the mid 50's celebrating his love of the theatre.
MAJOR
The Golden Coach (1953) follows a theatrical troupe on tour in South America and the tumult that is raised when the viceroy of a particular region having commissioned the manufacture of said lavish coach decides to present it as a gift to the fiery leading lady(the splendid Anna Magnani).
Rich in colour and in Renoir's preferred English version,this is a sparkling musical comedy full of energy and complimented by music by Vivaldi
MINOR
Elena and her Men (1956) Ingrid Bergman is the whole show as an impoverished Polish princess whose affect on important french politicans,businessmen and even the military could alter the french way of life.A wonderful crowd sequence and some nice "rules of the game"type stylings about love among the classes are let down by a ponderous second half which dissipates much of the fun that had gone before.Mel Ferrer acquits himself nicely as an admirer with slightly questionable motives.
MASTERPIECE
French Cancan (1955)
Joyous biopic loosely based on the the building of the Moulin Rouge.
The imcomparable Jean Gabin plays Danglard a theatre impresario who is determined to resurrect the cancan for the masses while at the same time mentoring a new mistress Nini(Francine Arnoul)in the art and keeping his current mistress Lola de Castro(a colourful Maria Felix)from finding out.
Film opens with a exuberant dance hall sequence and ends with the opening night of such vitality and earthy choreography that while it may lack the slickness of American musicals it leaves them standing in terms of sheer cinematic joy.
Everyone plays their part in this paean to another age .
Renoir often spoke of rendering reality through artificiality- colour representing moods and seasons etc- as well as bemoaning progress as inherently bad for art as a whole.Here in this set he expresses his love of life and art through the joy that music and the comedy of the theatre can bring.
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