Beatrice Altariba Movies

Gifted comic actor Darry Cowl plays the title role in Le Triporteur (The Tricyclist). A football fanatic, young Antoine (Cowl) follows his favorite team from one game to the next madly peddling his tricycle to his various destinations. Antoine is later needed to "suit up" during a crucial game and join his pet team on the playing field. And though it hardly seems possible, a pretty girl (Béatrice Altariba) falls in love with our feckless hero. Le Triporteur is the sort of film that Jerry Lewis might have put together in the early '60s. Perhaps Lewis' cult status in France is due to his stylistic resemblance to Darry Cowl. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Darry Cowl continues in his patented "French Jerry Lewis" vein in Le Temps des Ouefs Durs (Hardboiled Egg Time). Cowl plays a dimwitted cabdriver whose life is turned topsy-turvy when he wins a lottery. Our hero uses part of his windfall to bankroll an elderly artist whom he's befriended (it helps, of course, that the artist has a pretty daughter). Somehow this gets Cowl mixed up with a band of counterfeiters. The whole megillah comes to a riotous conclusion at an art show held at a fish market! As one can see, Le Temps des Ouefs Durs isn't exactly Grande Illusion or 400 Blows. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

French director Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage) is an unsettling, sometimes poetic horror film. Pierre Brasseur plays a brilliant plastic surgeon, Prof. Genessier, who has vowed to restore the face of his daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob), who was mutilated in an automobile accident. With the help of his assistant (Alida Valli), he kidnaps young women, surgically removes their facial features, and attempts to graft their beauty onto his daughter's hideous countenance. This naturally has an adverse effect on the "donors," some of whom commit suicide rather than go through life faceless. Franju's haunting, muted handling of basic horror material is what lifts Eyes Without a Face out of the ordinary and into the realm of near-classic. When the film failed to draw crowds under its original title, however, the distributors decided to exploit it as a two-bit "scare" flick with the new title The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Crazy Desire (La Voglia Matta) stars Ugo Tognazzi as a middle-aged Italian businessman on a cross country motor trip. He comes across a group of rambunctious teenagers, including sexy Catherine Spaak. Infatuated by the girl, Tognazzi allows Spaak to deplete his pocketbook to pay for a wild seaside spree for herself and her friends. When challenged to a fight by the leader of the kids, Tognazzi, much to his own surprise, wins, and is hailed as "one of the gang." But when he wakes up on the beach the next morning, he's all alone. Alternately wacky and wistful, Crazy Desire was the film that secured the international reputation of Italian director Luciano Salce. From the opening sequence during a amateurish outdoor production of Julius Caesar to the closing seascape shot of the solitary and bemused Ugo Tognazzi, there's hardly a false move in the picture. Crazy Desire was based on Enrico Siella's short story A Girl Named Francesca. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide