Vicious Roomers

The Forgotten revisits Henri-Georges Clouzot’s career — having looked at his last film, we now turn our attention to his first, which is finally available to buy (see below).

The definitive online resource on Clouzot is still Fiona’s article at Senses of Cinema, which is a timely thing to mention as she’s written a new article which will appear here tomorrow. Naturally, I think it’s great. Naturally, she thinks it’s terrible. We’ll let you decide for yourselves. Tomorrow, remember.

THE MURDERER LIVES AT 21 [L’ASSASSIN HABITE AU 21] (Masters of Cinema) (Blu-ray)

THE MURDERER LIVES AT 21 [L’ASSASSIN HABITE AU 21] (Masters of Cinema) (DVD)

“You’ll be lovelier each day, with fabulous pink Camay.”

Fiona my partner’s one piece of film criticism to date is a profile of Henri-Georges Clouzot for the Great Directors series at Senses of Cinema, here. A traveling retrospective of his work prompted me to trespass on the same territory, so I’ve contributed a different-but-related overview to Moving Image Source. Think of them as an endearingly odd couple…

The BBC once ran a series of five minute interstitial shows called Close Up, in which celebrities picked favourite film scenes — George Romero picked the opening of TAKES OF HOFFMANN (Robert Helpmann weaving between three chairs), Marcel Ophuls picked the masked dancer from his father Max’s LE PLAISIR, and British Labour politician Dennis Healey picked the climax of LES DIABOLIQUES, and did a remarkable impersonation of undead Paul Meurisse, without the end of ping-pong ball contact lenses. I wish I had a copy.

Hong Kong viewing

The new Senses of Cinema is online, and with it my CTEQ annotation (ie review) of Tsui Hark’s peppy, shrill, fun SHANGHAI BLUES. Here. This is one I volunteered for under a late-night misconception that I’d actually seen the film — turns out I’d seen the superior PEKING OPERA BLUES. Still, it was the work of an instant with me to track down a copy of the movie, see it, and form some kind of semi-coherent response. Fun, too.

Gotta do something about that self-pitying bio though.