Jacques Natanson Movies

From 1931 to 1934, Russian director Victor Tourjansky made Paris his headquarters. The last of his French productions was 1934's Les Yeux Noirs, released in the U.S. the following year as Dark Eyes. The alluring Simone Simon stars as Tania, the daughter of Moscow headwaiter Ivan Ivanovitch (Harry Baur). Ashamed of his profession -- especially when he's expected to "pimp" for his more lecherous customers -- Ivan hides the truth from his daughter. Imagine his shock and dismay when he inadvertently arranges an assignation between the innocent Tania and the not-so-innocent Rudin (Jean Max). How can Ivan rescue his daughter from a Fate Worse Than Death without revealing his complicity in that fate? ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

It really shouldn't be necessary to provide the English translation for Grandeur et Decadence. The story centers upon the Girbals, a bourgeois family living contentedly on the seacoast of France. Their lives are radically altered when Papa Girbal (Firmin Gemier) is persuaded to expand his cannery business. Suddenly showered with wealth, the family relocates to France, where despite the most persuasive of temptation the family manages to retain its fundamental decency. Even so, the Girbal's son Andre (Lucien Galas) becomes fed up with wicked old Paree and heads back home, there to marry his childhood sweetheart. Comes the Depression, which for the Girbals is depressing indeed: Papa Girbal loses his business, his wife Marie (Marcelle Geniat) dies, and daughter Suzanne (Simone Lencret) is "ruined" by a cad. Moving in with son Andre's family, a suddenly enervated Papa Girbal elects to start life all over again for the sake of his new grandson. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

An exercise in style, La Ronde was one of the few films of the 1950s to contain overtly sexual themes. The story is a series of character vignettes, set in Vienna in the early 1900s and held together by a narrator (Anton Walbrook). As the title implies, both the story and the film's visual motifs are circular. Director Max Ophuls uses an old-fashioned merry-go-round to foreshadow the film's events, in which each segment introduces a new character, who has an affair with a character from the previous scene. The film demands that the audience pay attention to the structure, to the interplay among the characters, and to the opulent visual elements; and the effect is synergistic delight, in which the viewer is engaged both visually and intellectually. Because it was filmed in black-and-white, La Ronde does not have the garish look of some of Ophuls' other films, notably Lola Montès. La Ronde is among the few foreign language films to receive multiple Oscar nominations, for Black & White Art Direction and Best Adapted Screenplay. ~ Richard Gilliam, Rovi

Max Ophuls' final film (and his only movie in color) is a cinematic tour-de-force masquerading as a biography, in this case a dazzling fictionalized life of the notorious 19th century dancer, actress, and courtesan. A still beautiful, but weary and disillusioned (and, as we later discover, ailing) Lola Montes (Martine Carol) is first seen as the featured attraction at a seedy American circus, appearing at the center of a series of various tableaux depicting the scandalous events for which she is known. With a strangely sincere yet sinister and manipulative ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) providing color commentary, some of it very ironic on two or more levels, the movie flows between these staged recreations in the circus and the events as recalled by the subject. In a series of dissolves, the film takes us through her girlhood with her mother, interrupted when her mother's lover (Ivan Desni) becomes attached to the daughter; her unhappy marriage and its aftermath; romances with composer Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg), abduction by a Russian general (in the arms of Cossacks, no less); her affairs across the landscape of Europe with men great and notable; her thwarted aspirations as a dancer; and her romance with King Ludwig I (Anton Walbrook) of Bavaria, which led to her being made Countess of Landsfeld, and, later, to his abdication. The gracefulness of Ophuls' cyclical narrative, and the transitions between the recalled elegance of the locales, and the people with whom her romances and affairs took place, and the seediness of the circus -- where she is also compelled, in the course of performing, to perform as an aerialist -- were lost on viewers in 1955. And for many years the movie only existed in a version re-cut without the director's approval, in which the story was presented in linear fashion. It was only in the 1960's, long after Ophuls' death, that efforts were made to restore the original structure, and in 2008 the movie's original Technicolor luster was restored to its full depth and richness. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi