Frederick Mariotti Movies
- 1947
Originally released in France under the title Le Silence est D'Or, Man About Town is set in the Paris of the early 1900s. Maurice Chevalier plays a director of silent films (whose working conditions are recreated with remarkable accuracy), while Marcelle Derien is an actress whom Chevalier hopes to turn into a film star. She falls in love with her younger leading man (Francois Perier), and Chevalier, after putting up a gentle struggle, bows to the inevitability of young romance. The first postwar US/France coproduction, Man About Town won several international prizes. Unfortunately, its American version was hampered by a misguided translation device: Rather than dub the actors' voices or utilize subtitles, the American distributor chose to have Maurice Chevalier narrate the film in English and comment upon its action. The resultant effect took the audience "out" of the picture when it should have been involved with the plot, and this clumsy translation technique was never used again. The best moment in the Americanized Man About Town was Chevalier's opening musical number, directed not by Le Silence Est D'Or's Rene Clair but by RKO film editor Robert Pirosh--who also trimmed the film by 17 minutes for U.S. audiences. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Maurice Chevalier, Marcelle Derrien, (more)
- 1926
Having struck box-office gold with his adaptation of the mystical Vincent Blasco-Ibanez novel The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, producer-director Rex Ingram adapted another Ibanez best-seller, Mare Nostrum, as a vehicle for his hauntingly beautiful actress wife Alice Terry. Set during WWI, the film casts Terry as Freya Talberg, a German secret agent. Though she seems to have ice water in her veins (there's even a hint that she prefers the company of women over men), Freya loses her heart to a Spanish sea captain, Ulysses Ferragut (Antonio Moreno). As a result, she is captured and sentenced to be executed, going to her death with a poise and dignity befitting a Joan of Arc. The firing-squad sequence is the film's piece de resistance, brilliantly photographed from the heroine's point of view by ace cinematographer John F. Seitz. Perhaps because virtually all the major characters die at the end, the film was a financial flop, even though its anti-war sentiments were perfectly attuned to the mid-1920s. For many years one of the most highly sought-after "lost" films, Mare Nostrum was restored to a reasonable approximation of its original tinted and toned glory in the late 1970s and has been shown several times over the Turner Classic Movies cable service. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Alice Terry, Uni Apollon, (more)
