1974 - PLACE DE LA REPUBLIQUE, a unique documentary.

Louis Malle and a small camera crew stroll up and down a Paris street interviewing French citizens in this example of spontaneous film making.

Shot over a period of around 10 days, Malle attempts to interview people about their lives and interests.  This could have been an awful film but as it turns out to be a pretty fascinating one.  It's amazing how personal people get with Malle when there is a camera and a microphone pointed in front of them.

Considering some of the nut balls that Malle interviews and particularly one right wing nut case, he is incredibly nonjudgmental.  Amusingly, one woman being interviewed is the daughter of an actress that Malle had worked with, she can't say enough bad things about her mother.  

This is not a perfect film, some of the interviews kind of ramble and it does have some slow spots.  But considering the challenge of a film like this,  it's a fairly successful  premise for a documentary.                                                                              

94 minutes.

1962 - VIVE LE TOUR, very good documentary on the Tour de France bike race,

The french filmmaker Louis Malle filmed this short documentary in the early 1960's.  It's under 20 minutes but is packed with a lot of interesting information about the race which includes such things as exactly how one goes to the bathroom during a bike race.

This is film making at a very high caliber.

19 minutes.

1967 - SPIRITS OF THE DEAD or Histoires Extraordinaires, Edgar Allen Poe stories by European directors

Another European anthology film, three sort of based on Edgar Allen Poe stories sexed up for film audiences and filmed by three major European directors.

Metzengerstein directed by Roger Vadim, features his then wife Jane Fonda in her 60's Barbie doll persona. Vadim dresses her up in a lot of questionable medieval costumes for the apparently  sole purpose of showing film audiences what a hot piece she is.  In other words, this is a typical Vadim film.

The story has something to do with Fonda falling in love with a horse who is the reincarnated spirit of her cousin ( played by her brother Peter Fonda).  She gallops around like a mad woman bare back, (on the horse, not the cousin).  Pretty unsubtle eroticism and pretty stupid.

William Wilson, directed by Louis Malle, stars Alain Delon as a soldier named William Wilson who is being followed by a doppelganger also named William Wilson.  This segment features a phallic cigar smoking Bridget Bardot.  Nothing very special here that hasn't been seen on an old Twilight Zone episode. 

Toby Dammit  directed by Federico Fellini,  is probably the best segment although it appears to be barely based on Edgar Allen Poe.  Toby Damnit is an alcoholic British actor who has traveled to Rome to film a biblical story in a western setting, sort of a spaghetti western religious epic.  The producer tells Toby Damnit that the film's style will be a cross between Zinnemann and Pasolini with a touch or John Ford.  

Fellini is sometimes a director who should be watched in short doses and not taken too seriously, Toby Dammit is one of his best films since it's short and actually funny.

121 minutes.

1956 - LE MONDE DU SILENCE, horror film starring Jacques Cousteau

Jacques Costeau the "father of the environmental movement" released this documentary of his travels around the ocean with the crew of his ship Calypso.

 

 It won an academy award in 1956 for best documentary and was apparently a very influential film. Le Monde Du Silence is also one of the most anti environmental films I have ever seen. Costeau and his crew of undersea explorers are shockingly unenlightened about the oceans they are exploring. Their interactions with sea life are jaw dropping in their insensitivity. In order to get a census count of fish at a coral reef they blow up the reef and count all of the dead fish.

  

 Later in the film Cousteau's ship the Calypso hits and kills a baby sperm whale. The blood from the whale attracts a school of sharks intent on feeding on the dead whale. This provokes Cousteau and his crew into their own frenzy of shark killing because as Cousteau says "ze shark is ze enemy of ze diver."

  

 The movie was co-directed by the great French director Louis Malle. Malle was known for his humanist approach in his films, but in this case that apparently that didn't extend to the fish. An amazingly clueless film.

 86 minutes.