The Brigitte Bardot X 7 Boxset from Québec
12-04-03, 01:56 PM
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The Brigitte Bardot X 7 Boxset from Québec
Québec distribution company www.imavision.com has put out a 4-disc boxset presenting 7 BB “classics” and 1 TF1 made-for-TV 1-hour long 1996 documentary on her life. The films are Les Grandes Manoeuvres (The Grand Maneuver), René Clair, colour, 1955; En effeuillant la marguerite (British title: Mam’zelle Striptease, Us title: Plucking the Daisy), Marc Allégret, B&W, 1956; Et Dieu créa la femme (And God Created Woman), Roger Vadim, colour, scope, 1956; Une Parisienne (La Parisienne), Michel Boisrond, colour, 1956; Les Bijoutiers du clair de lune (The Night Heaven Fell), Vadim, colour, scope, 1958; Histoires extraordinaires (Spirits of the Dead), Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini, colour, 1:66, 1967; Don Juan, Roger Vadim, colour, 1:66, 1973. Total length: 13 hours. I am still wading my way through all of them…
On the negative side:[*]All the films are in French only. There are no English tracks or subtitles (no captioning of any kind). Imavision’s website is French-only, even though they ship worldwide in NTSC all-zone format. “Histoires extraordinaires” is in its (original) French version, without the American Vincent Price voiceover, which may be a blessing after all.[*]None of the films are enhanced for widescreen, even though two of them (“And God…” and “Le Bijoutiers…”) are shot in Cinemascope and letterboxed. The others are either fullscreen or in a very acceptable and easily vertically squeezable 1:66 to 1:77 letterbox format.[*]There is no interactive scene selection menu although the films are normally chaptered.[*]The resolution tends to hover around the 5.0 Mbps mark throughout, which creates a problem only in the Cinemascope films (aliasing) on a widescreen TV.[*]The sound is Dolby 2.0 Mono even though the packaging says “Dolby Stéréo” (only the menu music is).[*]You had better learn to tolerate Vadim. He directed three of these films, plus one episode of “Histoires Extraordinaires” and co-wrote the script to “En effeuillant la marguerite”. [*]At least one obvious censorship cut has not been restored or smoothed over (BB changing out of her bikini while turning her back on Charles Boyer in “Une Parisienne”).[*]At least two of these films are available elsewhere on DVD : “Histoires extraordinaires” is available in its English-language (dubbed) edition. Criterion has put out its own edition of “Et Dieu créa la femme”. Imavision also sells its “Et Dieu créa la femme” + documentary disc separately (much cheaper than Criterion, of course).
On the positive side:[*]All the films are transferred from pristine or optimal and/or digitally restored elements. The colours are gorgeous. The sound is “fat” (except for the occasional reel change letdown).[*]Bardot is a genuine screen goddess of the first magnitude, often imitated, never duplicated. Her first, struggling efforts to master her acting craft are often more touching and rewarding than her later performances. (She retired in 1973.) Luckily, this early period is very well represented in this boxset.[*]Three of these films are absolute must-have classics. Histoires extraordinaires, loosely based on two Edgar Poe tales (“Metzergenstein” and “William Wilson”) and a totally free-form interpretation of the Poe spirit by Fellini, has a Vadim episode where Jane Fonda seems to be trying out her future Barbarella outfits while attempting a dominatrix persona (in French!) that has to be seen to be believed. In it, she falls in love with her cousin (played by her brother Peter) who then transforms into a horse. Enough said, it’s wicked! The Louis Malle episode stars Alain Delon and Bardot and is just an atmospheric appetizer for the main course, a 40-minute Fellini episode which is itself worth the sale price. Terence Stamp gives definitive closure to the James Dean myth as “Toby Dammit” in a series of images that are among the most important of the XXth century cinema and must-haves for Fellini fans. The music of this episode is by Nino Rota. Les Grandes Manoeuvres is a very affecting René Clair turn-of-the century romantic comedy starring screen legends Michèle Morgan and Gérard Philipe, in which Bardot has a small but lovely role among dozens of brilliant actors. This film was certainly one of the visual references for Minnelli's "Gigi" (1958). Its dialogues and direction (both by Clair) are also scintillating. [Granted: This last one is a little like including “All About Eve” on a Marily Monroe boxset, but it’s still a great film.) And Une Parisienne is the absolute prototype of many, many French sex comedies to follow, which later were attempted in a timid way by Hollywood, in every Doris Day/Natalie Wood/Sandra Dee/Polly Bergen and/or Dean Martin/Rock Hudson/James Garner/Cary Grant/Fred MacMurray comedy vehicle of the sixties. It features impeccable direction by prolific stalwart Michel Boisrond (reminiscent of Swiss clockworks – he was Clair’s assistant), a perfect cast (Charles Boyer, Nadia Gray, Noël Roquevert, André Luguet, Madeleine Lebeau and Henri Vidal, the French stage’s number one stud, husband to Michèle Morgan in real life) and Bardot’s finest comedy performance of all time. The film also crackles with the kind of unrelenting sexual tension that Hollywood has only attempted in the pairing of Paul Newman and Elke Sommer in “The Prize” (1963), where it still managed to be dampened by puritan innuendo and reticence. If you like this kind of film recently referenced in “Down With Love”, you owe it to yourself to see what they were inspired by. This film allows you to see what it was exactly all those films were aiming at but never really achieved.[*]The price is very attractive and should come to $7 or $8 US per film with shipping.[*]If you don’t speak French, the three films mentioned above are reason enough to learn it.
About the Vadim films:
Despite the popular misconception to the contrary, Vadim was never part of the French New Wave but very much a continuation of what the new-wavers called “le cinéma de Papa”, except for the fact that he pushed the sexual envelope to its very limit by showing his various wives (Bardot and Fonda, among them) in various states of undress which were shocking for the time (and still are, if you ask me). His films are mostly turgid, visually charming but static family soap operas where every possible sexual situation is exploited to the max and violence is rampant. They also please women immensely because of their Harlequin romance aesthetic, which approached the refinement of a fine art in the popular European cinema (and fotonovelas) of the fifties and early sixties. Still, his “Et Dieu créa la femme” shows a French Riviera that is much more believable and appealing than Hitchcock’s contemporary “To Catch a Thief”. It was responsible for the subsequent complete commercial invasion of the little village of St-Tropez where it was filmed. His “Les Bijoutiers du clair de lune”’ set and shot in contemporary (1958), backwards Spain, co-stars a pre-“Ben-Hur” Stephen Boyd and a post-“Senso” Alida Valli. It boasts a very unusual “sangria western” score by Georges Auric, which keeps the film from sagging too much in the middle. “Don Juan” (1973) is a decadent affair, one of BB’s last; it also features Jane Birkin. In “En effeuillant la marguerite”, Vadim’s script for his mentor Marc Allégret, about a “vraie jeune fille” (Bardot) who goes to Paris to escape her stifling bourgeois family and ends up in a strip-tease joint, is delightfully funny even though it often borders on vulgarity and salaciousness. But as with all the comedies in this set, it is inventive and wonderfully alive. The film co-stars matinee idol Daniel Gélin. It also allows a rare DVD glimpse of Darry Cowl, a physical chatterbox comic of the time who is an acquired taste and whose persona goes a long way towards explaining why the French love Jerry Lewis so much… If you ever had to sit through a couple of Darry Cowl vehicles in a row, you would elect Jerry Lewis president of France - in the first ballot!
On the negative side:[*]All the films are in French only. There are no English tracks or subtitles (no captioning of any kind). Imavision’s website is French-only, even though they ship worldwide in NTSC all-zone format. “Histoires extraordinaires” is in its (original) French version, without the American Vincent Price voiceover, which may be a blessing after all.[*]None of the films are enhanced for widescreen, even though two of them (“And God…” and “Le Bijoutiers…”) are shot in Cinemascope and letterboxed. The others are either fullscreen or in a very acceptable and easily vertically squeezable 1:66 to 1:77 letterbox format.[*]There is no interactive scene selection menu although the films are normally chaptered.[*]The resolution tends to hover around the 5.0 Mbps mark throughout, which creates a problem only in the Cinemascope films (aliasing) on a widescreen TV.[*]The sound is Dolby 2.0 Mono even though the packaging says “Dolby Stéréo” (only the menu music is).[*]You had better learn to tolerate Vadim. He directed three of these films, plus one episode of “Histoires Extraordinaires” and co-wrote the script to “En effeuillant la marguerite”. [*]At least one obvious censorship cut has not been restored or smoothed over (BB changing out of her bikini while turning her back on Charles Boyer in “Une Parisienne”).[*]At least two of these films are available elsewhere on DVD : “Histoires extraordinaires” is available in its English-language (dubbed) edition. Criterion has put out its own edition of “Et Dieu créa la femme”. Imavision also sells its “Et Dieu créa la femme” + documentary disc separately (much cheaper than Criterion, of course).
On the positive side:[*]All the films are transferred from pristine or optimal and/or digitally restored elements. The colours are gorgeous. The sound is “fat” (except for the occasional reel change letdown).[*]Bardot is a genuine screen goddess of the first magnitude, often imitated, never duplicated. Her first, struggling efforts to master her acting craft are often more touching and rewarding than her later performances. (She retired in 1973.) Luckily, this early period is very well represented in this boxset.[*]Three of these films are absolute must-have classics. Histoires extraordinaires, loosely based on two Edgar Poe tales (“Metzergenstein” and “William Wilson”) and a totally free-form interpretation of the Poe spirit by Fellini, has a Vadim episode where Jane Fonda seems to be trying out her future Barbarella outfits while attempting a dominatrix persona (in French!) that has to be seen to be believed. In it, she falls in love with her cousin (played by her brother Peter) who then transforms into a horse. Enough said, it’s wicked! The Louis Malle episode stars Alain Delon and Bardot and is just an atmospheric appetizer for the main course, a 40-minute Fellini episode which is itself worth the sale price. Terence Stamp gives definitive closure to the James Dean myth as “Toby Dammit” in a series of images that are among the most important of the XXth century cinema and must-haves for Fellini fans. The music of this episode is by Nino Rota. Les Grandes Manoeuvres is a very affecting René Clair turn-of-the century romantic comedy starring screen legends Michèle Morgan and Gérard Philipe, in which Bardot has a small but lovely role among dozens of brilliant actors. This film was certainly one of the visual references for Minnelli's "Gigi" (1958). Its dialogues and direction (both by Clair) are also scintillating. [Granted: This last one is a little like including “All About Eve” on a Marily Monroe boxset, but it’s still a great film.) And Une Parisienne is the absolute prototype of many, many French sex comedies to follow, which later were attempted in a timid way by Hollywood, in every Doris Day/Natalie Wood/Sandra Dee/Polly Bergen and/or Dean Martin/Rock Hudson/James Garner/Cary Grant/Fred MacMurray comedy vehicle of the sixties. It features impeccable direction by prolific stalwart Michel Boisrond (reminiscent of Swiss clockworks – he was Clair’s assistant), a perfect cast (Charles Boyer, Nadia Gray, Noël Roquevert, André Luguet, Madeleine Lebeau and Henri Vidal, the French stage’s number one stud, husband to Michèle Morgan in real life) and Bardot’s finest comedy performance of all time. The film also crackles with the kind of unrelenting sexual tension that Hollywood has only attempted in the pairing of Paul Newman and Elke Sommer in “The Prize” (1963), where it still managed to be dampened by puritan innuendo and reticence. If you like this kind of film recently referenced in “Down With Love”, you owe it to yourself to see what they were inspired by. This film allows you to see what it was exactly all those films were aiming at but never really achieved.[*]The price is very attractive and should come to $7 or $8 US per film with shipping.[*]If you don’t speak French, the three films mentioned above are reason enough to learn it.
About the Vadim films:
Despite the popular misconception to the contrary, Vadim was never part of the French New Wave but very much a continuation of what the new-wavers called “le cinéma de Papa”, except for the fact that he pushed the sexual envelope to its very limit by showing his various wives (Bardot and Fonda, among them) in various states of undress which were shocking for the time (and still are, if you ask me). His films are mostly turgid, visually charming but static family soap operas where every possible sexual situation is exploited to the max and violence is rampant. They also please women immensely because of their Harlequin romance aesthetic, which approached the refinement of a fine art in the popular European cinema (and fotonovelas) of the fifties and early sixties. Still, his “Et Dieu créa la femme” shows a French Riviera that is much more believable and appealing than Hitchcock’s contemporary “To Catch a Thief”. It was responsible for the subsequent complete commercial invasion of the little village of St-Tropez where it was filmed. His “Les Bijoutiers du clair de lune”’ set and shot in contemporary (1958), backwards Spain, co-stars a pre-“Ben-Hur” Stephen Boyd and a post-“Senso” Alida Valli. It boasts a very unusual “sangria western” score by Georges Auric, which keeps the film from sagging too much in the middle. “Don Juan” (1973) is a decadent affair, one of BB’s last; it also features Jane Birkin. In “En effeuillant la marguerite”, Vadim’s script for his mentor Marc Allégret, about a “vraie jeune fille” (Bardot) who goes to Paris to escape her stifling bourgeois family and ends up in a strip-tease joint, is delightfully funny even though it often borders on vulgarity and salaciousness. But as with all the comedies in this set, it is inventive and wonderfully alive. The film co-stars matinee idol Daniel Gélin. It also allows a rare DVD glimpse of Darry Cowl, a physical chatterbox comic of the time who is an acquired taste and whose persona goes a long way towards explaining why the French love Jerry Lewis so much… If you ever had to sit through a couple of Darry Cowl vehicles in a row, you would elect Jerry Lewis president of France - in the first ballot!
