Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Clarissa Mora The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Oslo Jargo (Bartok Kinski) Fairly good movie, it reminded me a bit of those 1950's existential films like The Wages of Fear (1953). It was based on a story by Jean-Paul Sartre. Lead Gerard Philipe died of liver cancer in 1959.Plenty of Mexican faces are in it like Jaime Fernandez, Víctor Manuel Mendoza and Carlos López Moctezuma.It was a collaboration between France and Mexico, filmed in Veracruz, Mexico. I found a copy at the San Francisco Public Library on VHS years ago and watched it.Death in the Garden a 1956 film by director Luis Buñuel is also very similar.Also recommended: A Man Escaped (1956) The Killers (1946)

writers_reign There's much here to remind us of The African Queen (made around the same time) in the two leads, a drunk living in filthy rags and a classy, well-dressed woman who together do something worthwhile. This is a wonderful melange of older and newer talents; Jean Aurenche and Michele Morgan had both enjoyed success in the thirties - Aurenche co-wrote Carne's Hotel du Nord whilst Morgan co-starred in Carne's Quai des Brumes - whilst Philippe and Allegret enjoyed THEIR first successes in the forties, in fact they worked together on Une si jolie petite plage as well as scoring separately with such titles as Dedee d'Anvers and Le Diable au corps. Together they make a formidable quartet in a story about redemption into which it's possible to read a religious subtext if you're so inclined. This is French film-making at its best and I can only endorse other commenters who have bewailed the (thankfully short-lived) emergence of the New Wave later in the decade. One to cherish.

taylor9885 Allegret's most impressive location story, far better than the damp philosophizing of Une si jolie petite plage. I liked the approach: the characters are not symbols of alienation or corruption but have lives of their own. The meningitis outbreak in this Mexican town doesn't stand in for the moral decline of the West, unlike the plague in Puenzo's La peste, one of the worst films William Hurt ever made. I imagine that if Luis Bunuel had done this adaptation of a Sartre story, it would have looked a lot like Los olvidados, and the vomiting and sweating of the victims would have taken precedence over the moral self-questioning of the characters.Gerard Philipe is tremendous as the drunken ex-doctor with a terrible secret; he was able to forget that he'd become the official leading man of French cinema, star of the Cinema of Quality that Truffaut detested so much. Ditto for Michele Morgan, whose parts usually had aristocratic backgrounds, or at least great wealth. As the not-very-grieving widow of the first disease victim, she holds the picture together, making sure we don't get too swayed by Philipe's lowlife antics.

withnail-4 One of the greatest films I've ever seen, this movie took me completely by surprise, considering I'd never heard of it, and the videotape cover was very cheesy. Set in a small Mexican town, the main character is a drunk who is so intoxicated throughout the movie he can hardly walk. A plague of cerebral-spinal meningitis hits the town. This film has a startlingly raw edge to it, like nothing else I've seen from the 50s, but more like a Midnight Cowboy kind of down-and-out unflinching view of human situations. One of the first images is of the drunk carrying a pig's head through the streets of town. He delivers it to a whorehouse. The prostitute offers to pay him with sex, but he chooses to be paid in tequila. There's another scene of him cleaning up vomit, and a scene where the local doctor, the drunk, and a woman tourist take turns inoculating each other in the spine with a huge needle. This is not to say that the film is shocking or gross, but simply human and realistic. The photography is utterly pure and perfect. Nearly every composition is dynamic, with a strong perspective, background and foreground in play, half the shots have some kind of movement, dolly or pan, which is used concisely and never intrusively. Every set up is intelligent, resourceful and well executed. The acting is simply brilliant, the stars are believable, realistic and likeable. I don't know the story behind this production, or why it has slipped into obscurity, but it struck me as one of the GREAT films, comparable to something by Robert Bresson(who is one of my favorite directors) so, as you can guess, I highly recommend this. It's a ten.