Crime Wave
('La chase au gang' by François Truffaut (written under the pseudonym Robert Lachenay), Cahiers du Cinema 38, August-September 1954)
A one-eyed director, Hollywood's André de Toth, would be king if Hollywood were blind. That's not the case, heaven forbid, and de Toth's uses his cyclops eye like a lynx, it is not resting in his pocket. A likeable man, de Toth makes likeable films but not without nobility, the noble man that he is. Crime Wave is one…
Elena and Her Men
(Elena et les Hommes by Jean-Luc Godard - Cahiers du Cinema 78, December 1957)
To say that Renoir is the most intelligent of filmmakers is to say that he is French to the core. And if Elena and the Men is "the" French film par excellence, it is because it is the most intelligent film in the world. Art and art theory at the same time. Beauty and the secret of beauty at the same time.…
L'hélice et l'idée by Eric Rohmer (Cahiers du Cinema, March 1959, N° 93)
Itself, by itself, solely ONE everlastingly, and single. – Plato
We would have gladly pardoned Alfred Hitchcock for following the austere The Wrong Man with a lighter work, more of a crowd pleaser. Such was perhaps his intention when he decided to bring the novel by Boileau and Narcejac, D’entre les morts, to the screen. Now, the esoteric nature of Vertigo, so they say, repelled Americans. French…
Francois Truffaut: 'A Wonderful Certainty'
('L'Admirable Certitude', Cahiers du Cinema 46, April 1955, written under the pseudonym Robert Lachenay)
We made our discovery of Nicholas Ray seven or eight years ago with Knock on Any Door. Then at the 'Biarritz Rendez-vous' we had a dazzling confirmation in They Live By Night, which is still unmistakably his best film. Later In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground and The Lusty Men were released in Paris at one time or another -…
