ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

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.

Jackson Booth-Millard This French film was featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, and from director René Clair (Beau Travail) it sounded like an interesting concept, I was kind of surprised to see only an average rating by the critics, but that didn't put me off wanting to see it. Basically in a French prison, cell mates Émile (Henri Marchand) and Louis (Raymond Cordy) are friends, and day after day they work in labour assembling various things, e.g. wood or metal products, and together they plan to make an escape. After the plan goes ahead only Louis successfully gets out and makes it, and on the outside after some time he reestablishes himself as a captain of industry and opening his own phonograph manufacturing company which gains good success. Émile feeling he would not be able to do it without the assistance of his friend has no further plans to try and escape again, but he does manage to seize an opportunity to do it himself, and he manages it. On the outside he goes to the primary phonograph factory owned by Louis and gets a job there, he has no idea his friend is the owner, and when they do reunite it coincides with the plan to upgrade factory operations to supply products mechanised. While dealing with their lives, issue with women and staying one step ahead of the law who may be searching for them, and the modernisation they learn will ultimately lead to emotional freedom that could not have come from escaping the prison confines, but they also find freedom brings some consequences. Also starring Rolla France as Jeanne, Paul Ollivier as Uncle Paul Imaque, Jacques Shelly as Paul, André Michaud as Foreman, Germaine Aussey as Maud and Alexander D'Arcy as Gigolo. The two leading actors playing the prisoners who may actually want to do some kind of good after escaping their captivity are good, I recognised immediately that this film obviously influenced Sir Charlie Chaplin to create the film Modern Times, there was even a failed legal battle by a producer to claim for plagiarism, but the director felt flattered, it is a funny film displaying then modern life in a certain environment, and a most watchable satire. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Art Direction. Good!

wes-connors From their French prison, convicts Raymond Cordy (as Louis) and Henri Marchand (as Emile) take advantage of silly putty cell bars to carry out a daring escape. The industrious Mr. Cordy is successful, but spirited Mr. Marchand is caught in the act. On the outside, Cordy takes advantage of the assembly-line work he performed in prison to become a prosperous phonograph records tycoon. Ironically, he finds his old friend Marchand working the factory production line, after he also escapes from jail. They renew their friendship, which has been threatened by industry.Director Rene Clair makes this an artful picture; from the great bicycle stunt win to the flying money, it's excellent - but, alas, not too amusing. The soundtrack, featuring music by Georges Auric, is effective - but, the spoken words seem unnecessary. "A nous la liberte" might have worked better as a non-talking picture. In a case where Mr. Clair felt imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, Charlie Chaplin employed a similar look and thesis for his "Modern Times" (1936). Although Mr. Chaplin's classic is counted as his first fully sound film, it is tellingly silent.******* A nous la liberte (12/18/31) Rene Clair ~ Raymond Cordy, Henri Marchand, Rolla France, Paul Ollivier

Nin Chan This film is feral, anarchic energy, imbued with Clair's keen intelligence and siphoned through crowd-pleasing Chaplin-y slapstick. I am constantly reminded of Jean Vigo's timeless "Conduit Zero" and "L'Atalante" as I guffaw to "A Nous La Liberte"- this one, through the course of a lean, sinewy 83 minutes, deconstructs the wholly arbitrary norms and myths that constitute our mechanized, capitalistic civilization before illustrating just how easily these protocol are upset and subverted. I have learned that Rene Clair had previously lent his hand to the surrealists in the silent era, and that does not surprise me in the least, for this film is, for all its cynical realism, is Surrealist in agenda, a thorough exploration of Liberty.The premise is simple- two convicts escape from prison and pursue vastly disparate avenues outside penitentiary walls. One becomes an unscrupulous opportunist and erects a financial empire, the (rather effete) other is more smitten with a flighty factory girl than money. By a dialectical process the two eventually renounce chimeras like wealth and marriage, opting for a life of Deleuze/Guattari-esquire nomadism, true freedom unrestrained by social expectation. Clair is rarely subtle with his jibes- the factory workers are represented as wholly expendable vessels of labor, weighed and assigned with serial numbers. Their lives are mechanized to the point of eating slop from a conveyor belt. The Paris that Clair evokes is not a romanticised, perfumed city of profusion and resplendence, but a graven concrete sarcophagus, populated with automatons of all varieties. The sole glimpses we get of organic flora are of wretched-looking daffodils, offered to an unappreciative object of affection. Most biting are Clair's sketches of the bourgeoisie, whose cultivated tastes revolve around rumor-mongering, rococo decor and totally maudlin and cloying music. Everywhere carnality peers deviously beneath the gaping crevices, seething and sizzling beneath the Victorian prudishness- look at the rakish dilettante who woos the tycoon's wife, and the virile factory worker who commands the secretary's amorous attentions.Through the course of the film, Clair's intent is in drawing parallels between life in the penitentiary with dehumanizing industrial life and stuffy bourgeois society, illuminating the worrying commonalities that all three share. The conclusive insight, then, is truly surrealist- man constructs his own prisons, circumscribing the possibilities of existence with norms that he then perpetuates with bad faith. When this epiphany strikes our phonograph magnate, he becomes privy to the sheer tentativeness of these stifling dogmas, and engages in a journey towards freedom, culminating in his renunciation of wealth and reputation.The latter half of the film is a STINGING lash against cant and cupidity, and the film reaches a summit in one of the most uproarious and singularly BRILLIANT sections in French film- a fierce gust of wind disrupts an octagenarian's garrulous, grandiloquent (and nauseatingly vacuous) speech, blowing away the elaborate ornamentation adorning the speaker's podium and scattering a profusion of overhead banknotes across the compound. The gathered industrialists resist temptation for a few moments before a madcap scramble for cash ensues, the bumbling old speechmaker struggling to recite his script in the resultant mania, the sole bastion of 'order' in this wild debacle. This is Clair's consummate statement- beneath the ostentation and contrived niceties, we can barely obscure our animalistic greed. The wind blows beneath surfaces and reveals mercenary ardor.A political film that you can show to your kids, as well as a consummate, meticulous masterpiece on par with any Keaton, Chaplin or Tati. Like those artists and Friedrich Nietzsche, Clair knows all about the subversive power of laughter. We must take his approach to life, to nurture the capacity to laugh at all the things we take so gravely, our environs and even ourselves. This is the wellspring of ecstasy and freedom in life. I wonder if Luis Bunuel was a fan...