Known for Acting
A wonderful documentary that sheds additional light on the fascinating project ‘Inferno’ was, as well as how those who were involved with it reacted to it during the shooting process. A riveting adjunct to the main feature, offering a glut of interviews with various people associated with the production, and presenting quite a bit more production data, as well as some unseen footage from Clouzot's shoot.
In 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot's production of L'Enfer came to a halt. Despite huge expectations, major studio backing and an unlimited budget, after three weeks the production collapsed. This documentary presents Inferno's incredible expressionistic original rushes, screen tests, and on-location footage, whilst also reconstructing Clouzot's original vision, and shedding light on the ill-fated endeavor through interviews, dramatizations of unfilmed scenes, and Clouzot's own notes.
Longtime friends Marc and Hubert are successful CEOs in their 50s married to beautiful women. When they begin to doubt their power of seduction, they send their wives on a trip together and start seducing other women, which leads to some sexual escapades. Rejuvenated, they join their wives, but their holiday is quickly disrupted by the intrusion of young sexy campers who bring a wind of erotic freedom and teach the older couples to reevaluate their lives.
Philippe Lantier, a wealthy womanizer, falls for a beautiful blonde, Madeleine. In the process of seducing her, he will discover that he's got a heart.
Two young oil salesmen from Hamburg, who are tasked with buying oil from the Middle East as cheaply as possible for their company, get caught up in a clash between a local gang of drug smugglers and the police. Each stage of this dangerous adventure could earn them either twenty years in prison or liquidation by the gang. The appearance of a beautiful, somewhat enigmatic woman adds to the allure. Two middle-class existences in a foreign country, confronted with the rude methods of the police and criminal elements, form the field of tension in this adventure story, which was produced with an international cast.
When Michel gets the life-sized sex doll he ordered, shipped directly from Japan, he is only intrigued by it at first. Then the silent unresponsiveness of the thing begins to haunt him, and he finds himself reacting to it as if it were an equally unresponsive living woman. As time passes, more and more of his life is spent trying to satisfy or placate its relentless silence, and he goes somewhat mad. He dresses the doll and takes it with him wherever he goes. When his usually very tolerant wife discovers what is going on, her jealousy knows no bounds and she attempts to imitate this threatening love-object. The light-hearted quality of this addle-pated fantasy darkens quickly when various neighborhood men attempt to put the doll to its originally intended use.
A federal agent whose daughter dies of a heroin overdose is determined to destroy the drug ring that supplied her. He recruits various people whose lives have been torn apart by the drug trade and trains them. Then they all leave for France to track down and destroy the ring.
In Algiers, during the Algerian War of Independence, one of the leaders of the FLN was arrested by the French colonial army, which used the most violent methods to make the prisoners speak. The use of torture poses a conscience problem for a French officer. Playing shot-reverse-shot, between the tortured and his torturer, in a suffocating camera, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina approaches torture by drawing inspiration from the story of his father, who died of abuse.
Filmed during the annual 24-hour endurance race at Le Mans, Michael Delaney is a Porsche driver haunted by the memory of an accident at the previous year's race in which a competing driver was killed. Delaney also finds himself increasingly infatuated with the man's widow.
A crackdown on drugs leads a burned out cop to take the law into his own hands and seek revenge against villainous drug dealers. Word comes down from above that the United States feels French authorities have been lax on their arrests of the dealers. A violent action feature finds the harried inspector battling his colleagues as much as the criminal element targeted for extermination.
In 1950, in Algeria, in a village in Kabylia, Algerian resistance fighters resisted the French occupation army. Bachir returns to the village to escape the clashes ravaging Algiers. In Thala, he has two brothers, Ali and Belaïd. The first is engaged with the ALN (The National Liberation Army) and fights against the colonizer. His second brother, Belaïd, the eldest, is convinced of a French Algeria. His family torn apart, Bachir decides to join the war and takes sides against the repression of the French army. The French army is trying in vain to turn the population against the insurgents by using disinformation. The more time passes, the more the inhabitants of the village and surrounding areas, oppressed, rally to the cause of the FLN, their houses and their fields will be burned... Adaptation to the cinema of the eponymous novel Opium and the Stick, published in 1965, by Mouloud Mammeri, the film was dubbed into Tamazight (Berber), a first for Algerian cinema.
In a mysterious French castle dark meetings and apparitions happen, seasoned by nauseating erotic menages. The involvement frantically increases up to the amazing epilogue.
