Paris, 1940. German occupation forces create a new film production company, Continental, and put Alfred Greven – producer, cinephile, and opportunistic businessman – in charge. During the occupation, under Joseph Goebbels’s orders, Greven hires the best artists and technicians of French cinema to produce successful, highly entertaining films, which are also strategically devoid of propaganda. Simultaneously, he takes advantage of the confiscation of Jewish property to purchase film theaters, studios and laboratories, in order to control the whole production line. His goal: to create a European Hollywood. Among the thirty feature films thus produced under the auspices of Continental, several are, to this day, considered classics of French cinema.
Part one of a BBC documentary about Jean Renoir.
Made a year after Luis Buñuel's death in 1983 this is an illuminating portrait of the surreal and visionary director, featuring clips, archival interviews, and commentary from scholars and contemporaries including Catherine Deneuve, Fernando Rey, and Jeanne Moreau. Directed by Anthony Wall with readings from Buñuel's autobiography by Paul Scofield. Six trims to meet copyright restrictions.
In occupied France during the WWII, a German officer is murdered. The collaborationist Vichy government decides to pin the murder on six petty criminals. Loyal judges are called in to convict them as quickly as possible.
Charlie is a former classical pianist who has changed his name and now plays jazz in a grimy Paris bar. When Charlie's brothers, Richard and Chico, surface and ask for Charlie's help while on the run from gangsters they have scammed, he aids their escape. Soon Charlie and Lena, a waitress at the same bar, face trouble when the gangsters arrive, looking for his brothers.
On this beautiful May 1st, Thérèse is about to give birth. Their presence at home is undesirable, so Jean, her husband, decides to take François, their little boy, to a soccer match. Their plans change when they meet a former factory mate who seems to have made a success of his life. This man, Blanchot, decides to return to Jean a sum of money he had once borrowed. Trusted, Jean is drawn into a clandestine circle, where his apparent luck delivers him without ulterior motive to Blanchot, who is one of the ringleaders. The police interrupt the dangerous game, putting Jean, who has no identity papers, in an awkward situation.
A story of the love of Frou-Frou - an actress and singer in the in the beginning of her career.
A prostitute goes on vacation to a beach resort with her young daughter (who's being schooled by nuns). Everything is cheerful and pleasant at the seashore; the customers at the hotel think she's a poor widow - she always wears black - and treat her like a lady. But when one of her former clients arrives, her carefree days on the beach are numbered.
The family of a Parisian shop-owner spends a day in the country. The daughter falls in love with a man at the inn, where they spend the day.
June 1944, a French town towards the end of the occupation. Following several attacks perpetrated by the resistance, the inhabitants who listen to English radio are rounded up by the Germans in a prison and considered as hostages. In one of the cells are found men from all walks of life: an aristocrat, the Viscount of Saint-Leu, Doctor Noblet, a resistance fighter, Béquille the wanderer with a wooden leg, and a strange character nicknamed "Black Market". The latter arouses mistrust among the prisoners, because it could well have been introduced by the enemy.
The forbidden romance between wealthy Giselle Preville and impoverished journalist Claude Dauphin. When Preville disappears, Dauphin is accused of kidnapping by the girl's snobbish father Rene Alexander. By the time the Normandie reaches New York, however, the "mystery" is solved and all misunderstandings blithely swept away.
The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general.