Jacques Maury Movies

Although the title evokes a swashbuckling adventure, Roman Polanski's Pirates tuns out to be a seagoing tale with a bit of a difference. Captain Red (Walter Matthau) runs a hardy pirate ship with the able assistance of Frog, a dashing young French sailor (Cris Campion). One day Capt. Red is captured and taken aboard a Spanish galleon, but thanks to his inventiveness, he raises the crew to mutiny, takes over the ship, and kidnaps the daughter of the governor of Maracaibo (Charlotte Lewis, soon to co-star in The Golden Child opposite Eddie Murphy). The question is, can he keep this pace up? ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Dale (Clio Goldsmith) is a married, expectant mother who holds down a job as a radio announcer and when a Frenchman, Maurice (Roger Hanin), telephones the station one day to correct a mistake she made in reference to the cinema, the two eventually end up agreeing to meet. Dale is part-French and this is one of the reasons for their first rendezvous. After the divorced Maurice sees Dale, he is attracted by her personality and charm, and the two become good friends, getting together whenever they can. Soon Maurice's son Bob (John Moulder-Brown) also meets Dale and is smitten by her just like his father. This adds a wrinkle to the already unstated feelings that pervade each meeting, feelings complicated by the fact that Dale does not have a very happy marriage but is unwilling to face up to it. Then one day, she goes into labor while her husband is away and in a series of comic sequences, Maurice is faced with seeing her through to a successful birth in the hospital (barely) -- an event that begins to finally resolve the many underlying countercurrents in the romantic tendencies of the protagonists. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In this farcical look at a female detective/mystery story writer, Cathy Palmer (JoBeth Williams) is an ordinary housewife living in Ohio with a condescending husband who is far from ideal. When Cathy wins a writing contest and has the chance to go to Paris and meet the author of the romance novels she loves, her husband tries to prevent the trip. In the end, Cathy's interests prevail, though her husband still refuses to go with her. After arriving in Paris, Cathy is knocked down by a car and wakes up in the hospital with all memory of her past life erased. In its place, she believes she is Rebecca Ryan, the heroine in the romance novels she has read. Carrying her unconscious role to the hilt, she dresses in elegant clothes and meets the comically rattled Alan McMann (Tom Conti) who becomes her partner, of sorts. Little does she know that Alan is not Rebecca's secretary, but the actual ghost writer of the Ryan novels. Cathy begins to suspect that villains are lurking everywhere, and her intuition in that regard is unerring -- she has doubts about the klutzy leader of the French opposition party (Giancarlo Giannini), and it turns out her doubts are well-founded. As the plot thickens, it becomes apparent that sooner or later Cathy-cum-Rebecca will have to realize the truth about her identity, but in the meantime, much skullduggery awaits. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Sam Fuller (1911-1997) directed this rather mediocre crime story about a Bonnie-and-Clyde couple -- how they got together and how they are pursued for a murder they never committed. François (Bobby Di Cicco) and Isabelle (Veronique Jannot) meet in an unemployment office, a likely place to find others in their profession: he is a cellist and she, an art historian. While there, Isabelle gets into a nasty incident with one of the clerks, and François helps her out of the office with the end result that the two continue meeting and eventually fall in love. They try to make money as street musicians, though nothing seems to work out. Isabelle then suggests they rob the three unemployment office personnel who were the most obnoxious to them, a suggestion that leads to their breaking into an apartment in which the occupant accidentally falls to his death. At first both Isabelle and the police believe she pushed the man out the window -- and the chase is on. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In another typical Jean-Paul Belmondo vehicle, the French action hero plays a policeman prone to advancing the cause of justice by any means necessary. On his agenda is a powerful drug cartel working out of Paris and Marseilles, with a drug lord (Henry Silva) who is essentially inaccessible -- but not immortal. Stunts (performed by Belmondo) and chase scenes on land and water enliven the story, but the scenes with Belmondo's love interest are rather marginal themselves. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The disarming comedy A Little Romance features Diane Lane as a 13-year-old American, living in Paris with her businessman stepfather (Arthur Hill) and her promiscuous mother (Sally Kellerman). Mom is currently enamored with pretentious-filmmaker David Dukes, and it is on the set of Dukes' latest picture that Lane meets another 13-year-old, insatiable French film buff Thelonious Bernard. A likeable street-smart petty thief and gambler, Bernard is instantly attracted to Lane. With the help of roguish old Laurence Olivier, Lane and Bernard arrange a romantic rendezvous under the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. Naturally, when the kids disappear it's a cause for international concern, but all ends as it should. Some of the best moments in A Little Romance belong to Broderick Crawford, unselfconsciously playing "himself" at a movie party. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Unicorn (Jean Claudio), a top enemy agent, is accidentally killed by his own comrades during a shootout. To fool the Other Side, the New Avengers arrange an elaborate hoax to make it appear as though Unicorn is still alive. Unfortunately, the villains have captured a foreign Prince in hopes of exchanging him for Unicorn--and the Prince has been wired to explode in case the exchange goes awry. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Alain Delon plays Mr. Klein, a French-Catholic art dealer during the Nazi occupation. Strapped for cash, Klein takes financial advantage of his Jewish neighbors, knowing that they have no legal recourse. Ironically, Klein is himself mistaken for a missing Jew, a man who has been using Mr. Klein's name as a cover for his secret operations. As he desperately seeks out that man, he learns a bitter lesson about life in the other man's shoes. Star Delon is one of the four producers of this French feature. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Two French peasants are mistaken for a pair of aristocratic nobles in this historical situation comedy. Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland play the dual roles. Happy to be taken for nobles, the pair soon runs to escape the guillotine in the wake of the French Revolution's blood purge of the upper class and royalty. Hugh Griffith play Louis XVI, with Billie Whitelaw as the amorous Marie Antoinette. The pair are chased by the evil Duke d'Escargot (Victor Spinetti). Orson Welles appears at the beginning and the end of the film as the narrator. Wilder and Sutherland encounter a variety of comical situations in their dual roles of peasants and blue-blooded eccentrics. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Originally released as La Guerre des Boutons, this French social satire was adapted from the 1912 novel by Louis Pergaud. The story takes place in two farming villages, where a feud has raged for several hundred years. The crux of the problem has to do with the weather: one village continually prays for rain, while the other craves eternal sunshine. Breaking up the monotony of the nonstop feuding is the behavior of the local children, who suddenly and mysteriously begin to chant the nonsense word "gadoube." Somehow this development escalates into a full-scale "war" between the kids and the grownups, with the buttons on their clothes serving as the spoils of battle! The original Pergaud novel would be refilmed as The War of the Buttons in 1962 and 1994, the latter film set in Ireland. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide