Marcel Bluwal

The film is based on a true story of a young actor, Robert Hugues Lambert, who was hired to play the role of aviation hero Mermoz in occupied France during WW II. But his career came to a brutal end when his homosexuality was discovered and he was sent to a Nazi camp. The Vichy government's directive to bring to screen edifying films based on national myths, such as Charlemagne or Joan of Arc, led one producer to decide to make a film about Mermoz, an airmail pioneer who perished at the height of his fame, crashing in 1936. This symbolic figure was also an activist in an extreme rightwing party, the vice-president of a movement known as 'The Crosses of Fire.' Lambert, a relatively obscure theatre actor was hired for his physical resemblance. Another actor was hired to complete the film, but the sound crew managed to smuggle a microphone through the barbed wires to get a recording of Lambert's voice. The film had its premiere in Paris, but Lambert was shipped to Auschwitz, never to return. Based on this story, Jean Claude Grumberg wrote a fictional comedy about making a film during the Occupation. He decided that only a comedy could narrate the way most French people went about their business with their heads in the sand during the Occupation, seeking refuge in derivative comedy. The film's light tone, however, changes dramatically at the end when Lambert is taken away. ~ Gönül Dönmez-Colin, All Movie Guide

Following the disastrous Pirates (1986), director Roman Polanski got back on creative track with this finely-wrought thriller that, while failing to impress at the box office, was nevertheless his most critically well-received film of the decade. Harrison Ford stars as Richard Walker, an American doctor who has come to Paris, where he's scheduled to deliver a paper to a medical conference. Richard has brought along his wife Sondra (Betty Buckley), because Paris was the site of their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Sondra picks up the wrong suitcase at the airport, which leads to her kidnapping and an ever-more complicated quest that takes Richard into the seedy and dangerous underworld of European drug smuggling and terrorist arms sales. Along the way, he is rebuffed by skeptical officials at the American Embassy and meets Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner), a sexy courier who agrees to help him in exchange for the money she's owed for trafficking in narcotics. Playing cleverly on American fears about Europe's Byzantine politics and "decadent" society, Frantic received, from many observers, perhaps the greatest compliment possible for a thriller, comparison to the work of Alfred Hitchcock. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

An overly ambitious young man hopes to rise to the top of the advertising business. When he feels his progress is being impeded, he conspires to murder his way up the corporate ladder. He uses the bodies of his victims as rungs to climb to the top in this macabre comedy of errors. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide