Alicia I love this movie so much

Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Griff Lees Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

treywillwest It was striking watching this film shortly after having attended a very fine museum exhibit on American Precisionist painting, a style in vogue at the time this film was made. As in Precisionism, the imagery here is concerned with the industrialization of society. Every facet of social life, not just the work-place, but the school and the prison-system seems to director Rene Clair to have been turned into a factory. The film features some extremely clever editing making the connection between industrial production and the production of passive subjects of capitalism clear. The difference between Clair and the Precisionists is that most of the latter saw in industrialization a utopian promise. What few who didn't, such as George Ault , understood industrialization in apocalyptic terms. In either case, it represented for the Precisionists an absolute transformation of life from which there was no turning back. For the filmmaker's part, Clair clearly understood modernity in sinister terms, industrialization bringing about the mechanization of the subject, but his humanism made it impossible for him to see the modernist challenge to humanity as insurmountable. For Clair, human dignity could be salvaged just by forsaking the materialist temptations of capitalism for the simple pleasures of life. Exploiter and exploited could return to a loving, communal relationship by embracing poverty and freedom. Art historians have proposed that the utopianism of Precisionist art was abolished by the horrific realizations of WWII. That would, it seems to me, to apply equally to the humanist utopia of Clair's cinema.

gavin6942 A famous left-wing satirical comedy about two ex-convicts, one of whom escaped jail and then worked his way up from salesman to factory owner, where he oversees a highly mechanized operation where the workers are reduced to mere automatons.Along with his two first sound films, "Sous les toits de Paris" (1930) and "Le Million" (1931), "À nous la liberté" shows Clair continuing to experiment with the possibilities of sound film. The image of a flower in combination with an unseen voice leads the viewer to think the flower is singing. Once accepted, the viewer is led to accept that a chorus of flowers is singing when Émile views the window from prison. As he does with narrative, Clair reveals the truth slowly and in a circuitous way so as to produce comedy and satire, in this case, by first suggesting the flowers are singing, and then that Jeanne is singing, when in fact it is a phonograph—revealed only because it runs down. This really is a great use of sound that was inventive in its day and still works now. I'm not sure if you could put such gags in modern films, but watching them here is still powerful, mostly because the style is still very much that of a silent film.The film later became embroiled in controversy with the release of Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" (1936), which bore some similarities to this film, such as the conveyor belt gags. Indeed, the film has some very Chaplin-esque qualities to it, and it would not surprise me in the least if Chaplin borrowed from Clair. Yet, as Clair himself maintained, he (Clair) had been inspired by earlier Chaplin films. So was it really theft or just a running homage?

Robert J. Maxwell Raymond Cordi and Henri Marchand are two prisoners in an environment without soul. The inmates all sit at a long table and make tiny toy horses on an assembly line. When chow time rolls around they clunk along in ragged lockstep in their wooden sabots to the mess hall where they sit at long tables and serve themselves from a treadmill bearing bowls of food and pitchers of water.Cordi escapes with the help of Marchand who is captured. Cordi is a promoter and begins a business selling old phonograph records on the street. Soon he's a big shot, a millionaire in charge of a huge plant, and owner of The Record Palace.Later, Marchand escapes too, in the kind of scene that Charlie Chaplin might easily have used in "Modern Times", which appeared five years later. Marchard is in his cell and decides to hang himself. He fastens a short noose around his neck and ties the other end to the bars across his cell window. Then he jumps from the bed. His weight pulls the bars from the window and they fall with a clank on his head.Overjoyed, Marchand climbs to the open window and looks out. On the curb below him sits an armless and crippled beggar with a coat draped over him, cadging change from passers by. Marchand leaps from the window and lands atop the beggar, who jumps to his feet and shrugs off the coat, revealing two brawny arms. A mélée ensues and Marchand is able to dash away.I don't know if Chaplin was inspired by "À Nous la Liberté," but it's a little too coincidental that in both films the workers should sit at an assembly line, one should miss a beat, causing the next to miss a beat, and wind up with half a dozen workers piling all over one another trying to catch up to the unfinished items on the assembly line. I guess if it was good enough for René Clair it's good enough for Chaplin, and for Lucy and Ethel too, for that matter.The plot gets a bit complicated. Marchand seeks out Cordi, who is of two minds about the matter, but helps him out anyway. Others discover Cordi's real identity and expose him. But just as the police are about to take him in hand, Cordi decides to get out from under and turn the factory over to the workers.If it was funny and sometimes touching before, the climax is hilarious. An ancient executive of the company is trying to read a famous poem in front of all the other executives and the workers. Gradually, a wind begins to blow, and then blows even stronger. From a hidden stash, a thousand franc note blows passed the executives in their tuxedos and high hats. A second note. The executives are getting antsy as the notes blow past their feet. They fidget and squirm, trying to remain dignified as befits their status, until one of them breaks ranks and makes a bee-line for a thousand-franc note. Then they all run madly after the money and so does everyone else. The listeners brawl, the wind blows away the stand, the band disappears, and the wizened old speaker finally finishes his poem, only to look up and find the entire courtyard empty.Cordi is the model of a phony rich guy who has married into society and now has a wife who loathes him and is having an affair with another mustachioed man whose hair seems made entirely of grease. Marchand couldn't be better as the simple-minded and impulsive child-like figure. And the director, René Clair, has done well by them. When the two escapees are together and faced by some common threat, they exchange glances and we can hear the rough cadence of those wooden clogs on the prison floor.

TallPineTree I wanted to like this movie more, especially knowing the movie's history and theme, but in the end I was often bored and frustrated. When compared to Chaplin's "Modern Times", even though it was made after this movie and apparently heavily influenced by this movie, I would say "Modern Times" is a better movie.I was bored in part because the rhythm of many 1930s movies have a slower pace. Scenes go on long to ensure the 1930s audiences gets the point, but modern audiences are quick to catch on. Even allowing for, and expecting, a slower pace I was annoyed at times by the movie's pace.I was frustrated with the lead character. He didn't stand out in a good way. While he was suppose to be a simple everyday guy the audience is to identify with, he seemed dumb, dim witted, and oblivious when it came to the woman he was infatuated with. I realize it was a movie style back then, but it grates if the actor doesn't have the charisma to pull this act off. It also doesn't help when this movie doesn't have a character say the few words that would clear up the confusion.I liked the sets - they were typical 1930s art deco. Big rooms, tall doors, and clean lines. Even though it was obvious and heavy handed, I was fine with the theme that industrial work is like prison labor, while the guards and professors proclaimed that work means liberty.This is shown by the following scene: Factory guards discover one of the escaped convicts lying in the grass outside the factory enjoying the day, and one guard says: "Not at work?! Don't you know that ...". Then the scene cuts to a classroom where a bearded professor tells his class: "Work is mandatory. Because work means liberty." The young children at their desks and writing in their notebooks then sing what the professor just told them.