Jean-Claude Brialy Movies

In this comedy, young Moses Levy is a Hassidic Jew who lives a quiet existence, avoiding entanglement with the modern world. However, his job requires that he travel between the diamond capital of Antwerp to Paris to deliver diamond powder to an auto assembly plant. Without his knowledge, a gang of cocaine smugglers stashed some of their similar-looking wares amid his own, so as to make it past customs. When they begin taking drastic actions in order to get their stash back, Moses is forced to call on his worldly brother Albert -- a man who has left the faith -- in order to stay alive. Along the way, he almost becomes romantically entangled with a Muslim girl and has encounters with an undercover cop in drag at a club featuring transvestite performers. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

A traveling theater troupe is divided by the romantic unrest of several couples in this sometimes macabre and uneven comedy drama. Baptiste (Guy Marchand) is the troupe's director who finds his creativity has been drained and who is in the process of splitting with his actress-wife Sarah (Caroline Cellier). Baptiste becomes friends with novelty-shop owner Charlie (Michel Galabru) -- who is later hacked to death by his wife Germaine (Marie Duboise) before she ends her own life by slashing her wrists. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Inspecteur Lavardin is a mellow, take-your-time Claude Chabrol effort of the 1980s, partly financed by French television. Jean Poiret had previously played the role of Inspector Jean Lavardin in the 1984 Chabrol film Poulet au Vinaigre (aka Cop au Vin). This story is built completely around the Lavardin character. The good inspector travels to a small coastal town to investigate the puzzling death of a well-known writer. In the course of his probings, Lavardin inadvertently uncovers several skeletons -- the kind that people keep hidden in their closets. Chabrol co-wrote the screenplay of Inspecteur Lavardin with Dominque Roulet. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A long parade of actors and actresses pop up in an unconnected series of skits, vignettes, and sight gags in this comedy anthology by Jean Curtelin. Among the sketches performed is one with Jean Carmet playing a man from the sticks woefully burdened with the challenge of getting through a dog food commercial on less than one tank of intelligible French. Another skit shows a silent duel between an airport custodian and an automatic door, while another with the renowned Michel Galabru sets up a strange teacher-student exchange. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In this political drama, freedom of the press, government intrigue, and the murder of an Arab diplomat form the knots of tension that challenge two crime-fighters: Yves Dorget (Philippe Noiret), a newspaper reporter, and Catherine Carre (Nicole Garcia), a TV anchorwoman. Both Yves and Catherine independently start to investigate the assassination of the Arab leader, who opposed the sale of two French nuclear reactors to his country. The reporter and news broadcaster are soon working together and along the way, heating up their past romance. The pair become convinced that the French Secret Service is involved in the assassination, and just as they are getting a little too close to the truth, Catherine's boss is ordered to basically shut her probe down. In the meantime, Yves has published a story about a man who saw the assassination, and now Yves is in some serious trouble. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In a first-time production by television comedians and café-theater actors, this is a slightly shallow comedy about a novice private detective and his cohorts, out to capture a feared "telephone killer" who strangles his victims (all female) with a phone cord. "The Commissioner" (Jean-Claude Brialy) runs the police investigation -- a kind of investigative competition with the amateur sleuths. A series of episodic sequences, comedic situations, and gags carry the action through to the final roll of credits, helped only a little by cameos from Michel Galabru, Jean Yanne, and others. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

With enough humor to make up for any minor shortcomings, this story about the bumbling Pinot (Gérard Jugnot), a Parisian patrolman with a heart of gold, works as both comedy and drama. Pinot is intent on straightening out the questionable lifestyle of Marylou (Josiane) (Fanny Bastien), a woman he meets in the line of duty. That meeting occurred when he caught her in the middle of something unacceptable, and tried to chase her down but she escaped. The next day, he comes across the fugitive Marylou again, and this time takes her into the police station (a good parody of a real police precinct). He feels sorry for this woman and tries to help her ease into a more normal life -- without knowing that she is an addict and her loser of a boyfriend deals in drugs. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This French kitchen appliance horror film antedated some of the American releases (Attack of the Killer Refrigerator (1990), Ghost in the Machine (1993)) by nearly a decade, and might be the first of its type. An epidemic of appliance madness unrelated to discount sales strikes an island off the coast of France: the islanders are being murderously attacked by ovens and refrigerators acquired in the same department store. Enter the young Dr. Gabrielle Martin (Anny Duperey), who arrives here to escape her own personal tragedy and instead lands in the middle of the kitchen mania. She tracks down the cause of the rapidly spreading epidemic to another doctor on the island -- quite as insane as any of the kitchen appliances (if the comparison could be made) -- and finds that the villainous doctor and the appliances have a most unusual link. Graphic scenes of mutilation by an oven, as one example, leave nothing much to the imagination in this film, but the interpretations of actors Anny Duperey and Jean-Claude Brialy as the good and evil doctors are excellent. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This tragic musical drama chronicles the star-crossed love between beloved French singer Edith Piaf and World Middleweight boxing champion Marcel Cerdan who died in a plane crash. The tumultuous affair is paralleled by the love affair of a French POW and his young pen pal who get engaged after writing to each other for four years and having never met. Their romances are framed by the sad, torchy songs of Piaf. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This self-conscious film with acting that is not quite up to par, is about an insurance investigator who meets an attractive woman in a hotel on his way to check out the causes of a fire that destroyed a movie set. The woman is still on his mind when he reaches the set, where contacts with the irritating, emotionally impaired movie crew leave him in a confused state himself -- all the more confused when he learns that his mystery woman had been working on this set as an actress when she suddenly left. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Directors Jean-Henri Roger and Juliet Berto begin this thriller with sequences on the contemporary politics of southern France and the infiltration of organized crime into real estate development there -- the crime bosses were torching forest tracts to make way for their development schemes in the early 1980s. In the fictionalized story, Paula Barretto (Juliet Berto) is caught in this underworld because her father was involved in the drug business, her brother is in the real estate scam, and her lover is an armed thief. Although she tries to get out of her corrupt and dangerous environment, it is not an easy task when even the police officers cannot be trusted, and the underworld has informants everywhere. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This ineffably bizarre drama stars Ben Gazzara as an American cartoonist who sees a beautiful woman named Nicole (Ornella Muti) being saved from drowning while he draws on the beach. He offers her a blanket, beginning a strange relationship with the obviously unbalanced woman which ends when she shaves her own head and walks into the ocean to die. Muti carries the film with an engagingly peculiar performance as the disturbed Nicole, who strips for bellboys, exposes herself to passing tourists, hallucinates insects in her bathroom, and goes into a coma after being raped in a mental institution. Mimsy Farmer co-stars as Gazzara's ex-lover and William Berger appears briefly as a bartender. Despite being blighted by a distracting Riz Ortolani soundtrack and a fundamentally lurid approach, Muti and director Pasquale Festa Campanile imbue this film with enough interesting touches to make it worthwhile. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide