"Actor: Louis Florencie"

• Panique (1947) | Blu Ray | (07/01/2019) from £21.39   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Julien Duvivier taps into postwar France's paranoia in a long unavailable thriller, adapted from a Georges Simenon novel Proud, eccentric, and antisocial, Monsieur Hire (Michel Simon) has always kept to himself. But after a woman turns up dead in the Paris suburb where he lives, he feels drawn to a pretty young newcomer to town (Viviane Romance), discovers that his neighbours are only too ready to be suspicious of him, and is framed for the murder. Based on a novel by Georges Simenon, the first film made by Julien Duvivier after his return to France from Hollywood, finds the acclaimed poetic realist applying his consummate craft to darker, moodier ends. Propelled by its two deeply nuanced lead performances, the tensely noirish Panique exposes the dangers of the knivesout mob mentality, delivering a pointed allegory of the behaviour of Duvivier's countrymen during the war. SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES: New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack The Art of Subtitling, a new short documentary by Bruce Goldstein, founder and copresident of Rialto Pictures, about the history of subtitles New interview with author Pierre Simenon, the son of novelist Georges Simenon Conversation from 2015 between critics Guillemette Odicino and Eric Libiot about director Julien Duvivier and the film's production history Rialto Pictures rerelease trailer New English subtitle translation by Duvivier expert Lenny Borger PLUS: Essays by film scholar James Quandt and Borger

• Les Enfants Du Paradis | DVD | (25/09/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A film which regularly charts high in critics' polls of the best films of all time, director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert's masterpiece Les Enfants du Paradis is as solid a landmark in French film history as the Eiffel Tower is on the Parisian landscape. And at 187 minutes running time, it's a massy edifice indeed, built from a rambunctious cast of characters--ranging from pickpockets and prostitutes to aristocrats and actors--whose lives intersect around the Theatre des Funambules, a popular Parisian theatre on the Boulevard du Crime, during the 1840s. (The title refers to the poor who can only afford seats in the upper galleries of the theatre.) The heart of the plot is a love story between mime artiste Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) and streetwalker Garance (the magnificent, sand-paper-voiced Arletty). When Garance is falsely accused of pickpocketing, Baptiste provides a mimed alibi for her to the police (one of the film's most famous set pieces). The rose she later throws him in gratitude sets off a romantic obsession, one of several that structure the film, as do love triangles, duels, and tortured confessions of feeling. Thematically, Les Enfant du Paradis gnaws over typically French cinematic preoccupations: illusion and reality, the nature of performance, the indomitable spirit of the proletariat and so on, all made the more charged and poignant when you know the film was shot during the Nazi occupation. (One actor, Robert Le Vigan, was reportedly a Nazi collaborator and disappeared during the filming under mysterious circumstances and so had to be replaced by Pierre Renoir.) --Leslie Felperin