French director Louis Malle's films given exquisite DVD treatment
In "3 Films by Louis Malle," three of the great French film director's most acclaimed films exploring the pains and vicissitudes of adolescence get the superior Criterion treatment, with outstanding high-definition digital transfers and bountiful extras found on a separate fourth disc. The three films are available individually or as a boxed set.
The extras include an astute analysis of Malle by French critic Pierre Billard (subtitled), who describes the filmmaker's childhood in a religious boarding school that mirrored "Au Revoir Les Enfants." Malle was, in fact, raised "very bourgeois, very Catholic, very devout," but after being expelled, he turned his back on the church ever after.
An accomplished documentary maker as much as a director of dramatic feature films, Malle got his training working with oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.
Many of his films were provocative, including "Murmur of the Heart," which caused a furor in its day with its suggestion of incest, which earned the film an O classification by the Catholic film office (original capsule review below).
His widow, Candice Bergen, offers interesting remarks on Malle's character ("always running, panting" with a "restless intellect"), and speaks of how the French never forgave him for working in America, and the pain he endured with attacks on two of his more commercial U.S. films, "Crackers" and "Alamo Bay."
There are some contemporaneous excerpts from French TV showing him making "Murmur" and "Lacombe, Lucien" along with audio-only interviews from the American Film Institute in 1988 and the National Film Theater in both 1974 and 1990.
The set also includes Charlie Chaplin's 1917 "The Immigrant," which the young boys in "Au Revoir" are taken to see.
The booklets with each film have beautifully perceptive essays by film critics Michael Sragow and Philip Kemp and historian Francis J. Murphy, and a reprint of the late critic Pauline Kael's original review of "Lacombe, Lucien." (Criterion)
"Au Revoir Les Enfants" (1987)
When the Gestapo discover that a priest has hidden three Jewish youths in a Catholic boys' school, he and the boys are arrested and deported to concentration camps. Malle re-creates a painful memory from his own youth in a restrained, humbling, well-acted dramatization of a boy's firsthand experience of the Holocaust. Subtitles. Some rough language. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-II -- adults and adolescents. (PG)
"Lacombe, Lucien" (1974)
Excellent French World War II drama about a 17-year-old farm boy (Pierre Blaise) who wants to join the Resistance but, when he is turned down as too young and irresponsible, joins the French collaborators of the local German police. The movie succeeds admirably as a chilling story of an immature youth but it also adds considerable insight to our knowledge of the history of this period. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-II -- adults and adolescents. Not rated by the Motion Picture Association of America.
"Murmur of the Heart" (1971)
French drama about the sexual maturing of a precocious adolescent (Benoit Ferreux) in an upper-middle-class family whose comfortable materialism is more offensive than the youth's sexual initiation in a brothel or the salvation-through-incest resolution of the story. The movie has some light humor and fine performances but depicts the sexual and social antics of the disinterested father (Daniel Gelin), the disorganized mother (Lea Massari) and their three parasitic sons as both healthy and amusing. Amoral treatment of sexual promiscuity and a bogus sense of social values. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is O -- morally offensive. Not rated by the Motion Picture Association of America.
Movies have been evaluated by the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishop's Office for Film and Broadcasting according to artistic
merit and moral suitability. The reviews include the USCCB rating,
the Motion Picture Association of America rating, and a brief
synopsis of the movie.
The classifications are as follows:
- A-I -- general patronage;
- A-II -- adults and adolescents;
- A-III -- adults;
- A-IV**
- L -- limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. L replaces the previous classification, A-IV.
- O -- morally offensive.
** Discontinued classification. All archived movies that were originally in the A-IV category are now classified as L.