Above: detail from the Argentinian poster for Magnet of Doom. Artist unknown.Jean-Paul Belmondo, the great French movie star who died last week at the age of 88, had a marvelous face. He wasn’t a classic matinee idol like his friend and compatriot Alain Delon but with the combination of his soulful puppy-dog eyes, lopsided boxer’s nose, and luscious feminine lips he could play both hoodlums or heartthrobs (and in Breathless he played both at the same time). A classic tough guy best known outside France for art movies, he was initially synonymous with the angry alienation of the French New Wave and starred in films by Godard, Truffaut, Melville, Malle and Lelouch. But he could play comedy as well as action (he was renowned for doing his own stunts) and was for a while promoted as a French James Bond. By the ’70s and ’80s—when he was...
- 9/16/2021
- MUBI
If Jean-Paul Belmondo had gotten his way, he would have been a stage actor. He applied to the Conservatoire de Paris three times before the illustrious drama school accepted him and spent the 1950s trying to launch a theater career.
Lucky for world cinema, Belmondo had greater success on screen, thanks to his role in 1960’s “Breathless,” the movie that launched the French New Wave — and instantly rendered everything Hollywood had been doing old-fashioned. In “Breathless,” Belmondo wasn’t playing a gangster so much as someone who had seen too many gangster movies, a self-styled tough guy who took Humphrey Bogart as his model. His crime spree feels more improvised than scripted, while his doesn’t-care, screw-society attitude effectively thumbed its nose at all the good reasons on-screen criminals had used to justify their actions before.
Godard’s film made Belmondo the face of the New Wave — a handsome mug...
Lucky for world cinema, Belmondo had greater success on screen, thanks to his role in 1960’s “Breathless,” the movie that launched the French New Wave — and instantly rendered everything Hollywood had been doing old-fashioned. In “Breathless,” Belmondo wasn’t playing a gangster so much as someone who had seen too many gangster movies, a self-styled tough guy who took Humphrey Bogart as his model. His crime spree feels more improvised than scripted, while his doesn’t-care, screw-society attitude effectively thumbed its nose at all the good reasons on-screen criminals had used to justify their actions before.
Godard’s film made Belmondo the face of the New Wave — a handsome mug...
- 9/7/2021
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
Jean-Paul Belmondo, whose bad-boy presence in Jean-Luc Godard’s new wave masterpiece “Breathless” established him as the French idol of his generation, has died, Variety has confirmed. He was 88.
For more than a decade following the release of “Breathless,” Belmondo reigned as one of France’s top box office stars. The actor was likened alternately to James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando for his brooding, charismatic persona, and he proved able to work in virtually any genre. After “Breathless,” the cult that formed around him was dubbed le belmondisme by the French media. Unlike Dean, who was a rebel without a cause, Belmondo’s antihero persona was more existential, detached and irredeemable. With such magnetism, an American career could have been his for the asking, but he largely resisted studio-made productions and later in life openly criticized Hollywood for overly dominating film screens in France.
Though most closely associated with Godard,...
For more than a decade following the release of “Breathless,” Belmondo reigned as one of France’s top box office stars. The actor was likened alternately to James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando for his brooding, charismatic persona, and he proved able to work in virtually any genre. After “Breathless,” the cult that formed around him was dubbed le belmondisme by the French media. Unlike Dean, who was a rebel without a cause, Belmondo’s antihero persona was more existential, detached and irredeemable. With such magnetism, an American career could have been his for the asking, but he largely resisted studio-made productions and later in life openly criticized Hollywood for overly dominating film screens in France.
Though most closely associated with Godard,...
- 9/6/2021
- by Richard Natale
- Variety Film + TV
Above: French poster for Le silence de la mer (Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1949). Design by Raymond Gid.Many great filmmakers never got the posters their films deserved. Some of my favorite filmmakers—I'm thinking Yasujiro Ozu, Jacques Rivette, Mike Leigh, and Jean-Marie Straub, to name just a few—for one reason or another, whether it be the vagaries of distribution, the particulars of time and the place, or just the fact that what is so extraordinary about their filmmaking doesn’t translate to still images, have very few posters worthy of their reputation. Jean-Pierre Melville is not one of those. Undoubtedly, the archetype of Melville’s cinema—the trench-coat and fedora sporting, pistol touting tough guy—lends himself beautifully to graphic invention. But Melville made other kinds of films too, and somehow the posters for his entire 13-film oeuvre are an embarrassment of riches. It didn’t hurt that the great French poster artist,...
- 5/6/2017
- MUBI
Jean-Pierre Melville in his own film, Two Men in Manhattan“A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything”—Yukio MishimaA voracious cinephile in his early youth, Jean-Pierre Grumbach's daily intake of films was interrupted by the Second World War when he enlisted in the Ffl (Forces Français Libres) and adopted the nom de guerre by which he's still known to these days: Jean-Pierre Melville. A tribute to his literary hero, Hermann Melville, and his novel Pierre: or the Ambiguities, the director would have his name officially changed after the war. The latter was to shape and inform many of his films and arguably all of his world-view, characterized by a sort of ethical cynicism where anti-fascism is understood as a moral duty rather than an act of heroic courage. Profoundly anti-rhetoric and filled with a terse dignity, his films about the Resistance, Army of Shadows (1969) above all,...
- 5/1/2017
- MUBI
Above: Larry Rivers’ poster for the first New York Film Festival.
With the New York Film Festival celebrating its 50th edition next week I thought I’d look back on the very first festival, 49 years ago, in 1963. Whereas this year’s festival has a main slate of 33 films (as well as abundant sidebars) the inaugural event, programmed by Richard Roud and Amos Vogel, had only 21 features and a selection of shorts. The festival opened—on a Tuesday evening, September 10th, 1963—with a now-classic but then ill-received Buñuel, The Extermining Angel, and closed with a film and a director that have been all but forgotten: Dragées au poivre (Sweet and Sour), a French-Italian comedy with an all-star cast, directed by one Jacques Baratier.
Of the 21 selections—handpicked by Roud and Vogel as the year’s best—only six (masterpieces by Buñuel, Ozu, Olmi, Kobayashi, Polanski and Resnais) are currently available on DVD in the Us,...
With the New York Film Festival celebrating its 50th edition next week I thought I’d look back on the very first festival, 49 years ago, in 1963. Whereas this year’s festival has a main slate of 33 films (as well as abundant sidebars) the inaugural event, programmed by Richard Roud and Amos Vogel, had only 21 features and a selection of shorts. The festival opened—on a Tuesday evening, September 10th, 1963—with a now-classic but then ill-received Buñuel, The Extermining Angel, and closed with a film and a director that have been all but forgotten: Dragées au poivre (Sweet and Sour), a French-Italian comedy with an all-star cast, directed by one Jacques Baratier.
Of the 21 selections—handpicked by Roud and Vogel as the year’s best—only six (masterpieces by Buñuel, Ozu, Olmi, Kobayashi, Polanski and Resnais) are currently available on DVD in the Us,...
- 9/21/2012
- MUBI
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