The Guardian (Free subscription) | 12/05/2009
The other night, in the rain, in the dark, I watched Serge Bromberg's documentary on the salvaged rushes of Henri-Georges Clouzot's abandoned film from 1964: L'Enfer . According to Clouzot's meticulous storyboards, the film was about a young couple, Odette and Marcel Prieur, who own a remote hotel beside a lake. The plot, it seems, was simple: the elongations of the husband's paranoid jealousy. The...
The Independent (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
Henri-Georges Clouzot's reputation is founded on The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955), and it might have been enhanced if he had completed his 1964 project, Inferno, about a jealous husband driven towards insanity.
Daily Express (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
CINEMA history is littered with tales of the ones that got away. None are more intriguing than that of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno.
Channel 4 (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's film is all at once a partial reconstruction of Henri-George Clouzot's unfinished masterpiece Inferno, and a documentary on its tragic unmaking. Rating:4.5
Ferdy on Films, etc. (Free subscription) | 10/13/2009
2009 Chicago International Film Festival Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot, 2009) Directors: Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea By Marilyn Ferdinand Film history is littered with the carcasses of unfinished films, scraps of film tests, legendary ideas that never got...
frogsmoke.com (Free subscription) | 09/28/2009
In 1964, French director Henri-Georges Clouzot chose Romy Schneider, 26, and Serge Reggiani, 42 years to be the stars of 'L' Enfer'. An enigmatic and unusual project, an unlimited budget, a film that would be an 'event' movie at its release. But after three weeks of filming, the project was interrupted, and the 'incredible' images [...]
Not Coming to a Theater Near You (Free subscription) | 09/21/2009
TIFF coverage – In 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot began shooting an experimental quasi-thriller called L’Enfer , starring Serge Reggiani and Romy Schneider. The film’s jealous-lover scenario was fairly basic, by all accounts, but Clouzot was apparently less interested in the story than in appropriating for the screen some of the crazy kaleidoscopic imagery that he’d recently seen...
SHADOWPLAY (Free subscription) | 09/19/2009
A kind Shadowplayer sent me a copy of Thorold Dickinson’s SECRET PEOPLE, which features the first major performance by Audrey Hepburn, so always gets a sort of footnote position in the history books, but deserves better. A rather downbeat tale of terrorism and espionage, it stars Valentina Cortese as Hepburn’s big sister, lured into an [...]
Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind (Free subscription) | 09/13/2009
"You have to see your madness through"Somewhere late in Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's new documentary L'Enfer D'Henri-Georges Clouzot (about the famed director's "lost" 1964 film L'Enfer), Clouzot himself states the above philosophy. It's meant as a general approach artists should take with their work, but by this point in the story it feels more like a summation of both...
Baltimore Sun (Free subscription) | 09/11/2009
'62 crime flick is fine introduction to French director's work Both fans and detractors of Quentin Tarantino should check out films by his great predecessor, the French writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville, whose "Army of Shadows," a summer hit at the Charles several years ago, plays like an adult riposte to "Inglourious Basterds."
Baltimore Sun (Free subscription) | 09/11/2009
'62 crime flick is fine introduction to French director's work Both fans and detractors of Quentin Tarantino should check out films by his great predecessor, the French writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville, whose "Army of Shadows," a summer hit at the Charles several years ago, plays like an adult riposte to " Inglourious Basterds."
The Hollywood Reporter: Risky Biz Blog (Free subscription) | 09/05/2009
By Jay A. Fernandez There's a reason that obsession is such a vibrant theme for a certain type of film director: It's a none-too-subtle validation of the filmmaker's own fetishized process and ritual abuse of cast and crew. So it...
DVD Times (Free subscription) | 12/10/2008
DVD Video Review: Jean-Pierre Melville gives Belmondo a fedora and trench coat as the director begins his pronounced shift into the world of detached gangsters. The Criterion DVD is reviewed here by clydefro.
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 10/31/2008
RATING: (POLITE APPLAUSE) Over the past few years, something has been happening to the career and work of director Jean-Pierre Melville that we usually don't associate with cinema, but rather with literature and the visual arts. Thirty-five years after...
DVD Times (Free subscription) | 10/16/2008
DVD Video Review: Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier play their horns and their ladies in the cool black and white of Paris streets. An essential for enthusiasts of jazz in film.
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