Edwige Feuillère Movies

OSS 117 (Luc Merenda) is the French secret agent working for the CIA. His Brazilian vacation is interrupted when he kills a look alike villain stalking him. Soon he is pursued by international agents who believe he is the dead man. Elsa Martinelli provides his romantic interest in a film that patterns itself after the many James Bond features. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

In this drama, a Neapolitan lad travels to Milan to attend his father's funeral. His father was a gigolo, and the young man decides to continue the family profession and begins looking for rich women to prey upon. He is successful, but then he finds himself caught in a bidding war between a wealthy steel heiress and an rich old homosexual. Though the homosexual wins, the gigolo decides to make it with the heiress. Time passes and he ends up falling for a beautiful woman. Unfortunately, he discovers that she is his half sister. He then remembers a bit of advice from one of his father's friends who said "It's better for a young man to attach himself to a rich homosexual." The young gigolo heeds that advice. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

While visiting a vegetarian restaurant, a young writer finds a corpse in the restroom. When he returns with the police, the body is gone. The writer is left with the unlucky fellow's hat -- which leads a certain beautiful woman to believe that his identity is the same as the dead man's. Not only is his life now at risk, but things get increasingly bizarre as he meets up with a mysterious sect of cannibals and with a group of opium-smuggling gangsters. What's more, the woman herself seems to have a diabolical doppleganger. Aimez-Vous Les Femmes? was adapted by Roman Polanski and Gerard Brach from a book by Georges Bardawil. The distinguished Sacha Vierny contributed his cinematographic talent to this black comedy shortly after his successful collaboration (among many) with director Alain Resnais on Muriel, ou le Temps d'un Retour/Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963). ~ Kristie Hassen, All Movie Guide

French filmmaker Sacha Guitry had intended to direct as well as write 3DLa Vie a Deux3D (3DLife as a Couple3D), but death claimed him before he could bring his plan to fruition. Adapted from Guitry's original by Jean Martin and directed by Clement Duhor, the film offers an all-star cast in a series of seriocomic anecdotes. The narrative is tied together by a millionaire novelist (based on Guitry himself), who on his deathbed wants to bequeath his fortune to several married couples upon whom he'd based one of his books. The proviso is that the couples must have remained happily wed to claim their money. The millionaire's family anxiously hire private detectives to prove that the couples in question are not only unhappy, but shameless philanderers in the bargain. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Quand la Femme S'en Mele (When the Woman Butts In) stars French film favorite Edwige Feuillere as a high-class gangster's moll named Maine. When Maine's first husband and daughter pay a visit, it's an awkward time for our heroine and her current amour, gang boss Godot (Jean Servais). In addition to fielding a lot of embarrassing questions, Godot also has to deal with a pesky turf war with a rival mobster. Not that the ex-husband is a paragon of virtue: he's busy trying to get even with a crooked business associate. Billed fourth in the cast of Quand la Femme s'en Mele is Alain Delon, who, according to contemporary viewers, "shows promise". ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Les Fruits de L'Ete (Fruits of Summer) serves as a vehicle for the venerable Edwige Feuillere. The thinnish storyline is little more than a series of romantic misunderstandings, each one sillier than the last. Throughout, the characters try to observe the correct social proprieties despite all the chaos occurring around them. Towards the end, the film takes a dramatic turn, but the audience is assured that all will turn out well. The bulk of the amorous complications are handled by Etchika Choureau as a frisky young lass and Claude Nicot as her collar-ad suitor. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Newly married Daniel Gelin spends most of Adorable Creatures reflecting longingly on his previous amours. One of his past conquests was unhappy housewife Danielle Darrieux. Another was insatiable widow Edwige Feuillere. And yet another was avaricious Martine Carol (then married to director Christian-Jacque). Originally released in France in 1952, Adorable Creatures didn't get theatrical play in the US in 1956, and then only in a heavily bowdlerized addition. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Olivia was directed by Jacqueline Audry, who burst onto the worldwide cinema scene with 1949's Gigi. The title character, played by Claire Olivia, is a naïve new student in a fashionable finishing school. Denied affection in her own home, Olivia latches onto her headmistress Julie (Edwige Feuillere). The relationship between the older and younger woman is observed with white-hot jealousy by Cara (Simone Simon), Julie's business partner and would-be lover. Nothing good can come of this, and nothing does. Though the material lends itself to sensationalism, director Audry handles Olivia with discretion and taste. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Thanks to the popularity of the 1948 cinemazation of Gigi, the "fin de siecle" novels of Colette suddenly became hot properties in the French cinema. Julie de Carneilhan stars Edwige Feuillere in the title role. A divorcee, Julie de Carneilhan finds herself ardently pursued by a roue (Pierre Brasseur) and by her more reliable younger cousin (Jacques Dumesil). Like most of Colette's works, Julie de Carneilhan talks a great deal about sex and sexuality, but shows very little. The film's preponderance of dialogue, witty though it may have been, left American audiences dissatisfied. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Pauline Kael has characterized Jean Cocteau's The Eagle with Two Heads (L'aigle a deux tetes) as an inversion of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946). On surface, this is true: In Beauty, the heroine awakens the handsome, good man lurking within the beast, while in Eagle it is the woman who is aroused from her spell by the hero. The woman is a queen (Edwidge Feuillere) who is despised by the populace; the man is a poet (Cocteau regular Jean Marais), who has come to assassinate her. By breaking the evil influence holding her, the poet (who looks just like the queen's late husband) restores the queen to her innate goodness, and the two fall in love. Cocteau adapted The Eagle with Two Heads from his own stage play, which would later be staged on videotape by Michelangelo Antonioni as Il Mistero di Oberwald (1980). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This is just a casual observation, but it's highly possible that more film adaptations of the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky were made in France than in Russia. In 1946 there appeared a faithful (if by necessity truncated) French version of the Russian novelist's The Idiot. Gerard Philipe plays the title character, Russian prince Myshkin, who returns to St. Petersburg after a stay in a Swiss mental hospital. The Prince is not literally a mental midget; he is considered an idiot because, as an honest and upright person, he cannot keep pace with the evil in the world. He busies himself with the petty problems of his aristocratic friends, which drive him back into the recesses of insanity. Edwige Feuillere costars as Nastasia, the woman of loose morals who turns out to be the only person who truly cares about Myshkin's welfare, while Lucien Coedel plays the nominal villain of the piece, an iconoclastic flour merchant named Rogozhin, whose passion for Nastasia culminates in tragedy. L'Idiot was remade in Japan by Akira Kurosawa in 1951, and in Russia in 1959. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this French romance, a genius composer/violinist finds great success but no love because he cannot seem to connect with his soul mate, a beautiful woman whom he met and wooed when they were both young. It was he who ended the relationship. Ten years pass, and finally they meet again. Now he is ready to commit to her. Unfortunately, his current girl friend has her own ideas. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide