Les Orgueilleux / The proud ones (1953)
Les Orgueilleux / The proud ones (1953)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL | 4:3 | 720x480 | 5700 kbps | 6.9Gb
Audio: French AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: French, English
01:38:00 | France, Mexico | Drama
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL | 4:3 | 720x480 | 5700 kbps | 6.9Gb
Audio: French AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: French, English
01:38:00 | France, Mexico | Drama
A young woman, Nelly, arrives in a remote Mexican town with her sick husband. Diagnosed with having meningitis, her husband dies a short while later and Nelly is left alone, having lost her money and her travel tickets. She is drawn to a scruffy drunk named Georges who, she discovers, is an French expatriate who never recovered from the tragic death of his wife.
Directors: Yves Allegret, Rafael E. Portas
Cast: Michele Morgan, Gerard Philipe, Carlos Lopez Moctezuma, Michele Cordoue, Andre Toffel, Arturo Soto Rangel, Josefina Escobedo, Jaime Fernandez, Chel Lopez, Victor Manuel Mendoza, Lucrecia Munoz, Beatriz Ramos, Guillermo Segura, Salvador Terroba
Les Orgueilleux / The proud ones (1953)
Les Orgueilleux / The proud ones (1953)
Les Orgueilleux was an ambitious attempt to break with the conventional romantic drama which dominated French cinema in the early 1950s. Filmed mainly on location in Mexico and with some graphic depictions of human suffering, it has an hard-edged authenticity which the Paris-bound studio dramas of the period lacked. Some of the images in the film still retain their power to shock, particularly the seemingly interminable shot where Michele Morgan is injected with a syringe needle.
The only thing that mars the film is the traditional, overly cautious direction, which gives the film a dated feel and partly undermines the wonderfully heavy doom-laden atmosphere. If only its director Yves Allegret had been a little more daring and gone more in the direction of all-out neo-realism this would have been an unequivocal masterpiece. In spite of that, it remains an impressive work, which makes a perceptive and uncompromising assessment of human nature.
Sublime performances from Michele Morgan and Gerard Philipe makes this a compelling and poignant film. Morgan is particularly impressive, playing (against type) a slightly amoral character who has great difficulty showing her emotions. She conveys the unspeakable hell of her character’s predicament with great force and subtlety, bringing a much needed humanity to what is pretty grim drama. (James Travers on Films de France)
Extras:
- Yves Allegret and Michele Morgan interviews (French, unsubbed)
IMDb
The first to die in an epidemic of meningitis in Vera Cruz is a French tourist. His wife Nellie, detached and indifferent, feels little grief and realizes that her coldness is her own doom. Over the next two days, she is attracted to George, a local drunk who does odd jobs for brothels and dances grotesquely for tourists in exchange for drinks. George has his own dark secret, a tragedy he caused that leaves him with a death wish. In assisting the local doctor to cope with the epidemic, these two emotional cripples enable each other to rediscover reasons to live and to love.
Les Orgueilleux / The proud ones (1953)
Les Orgueilleux / The proud ones (1953)
