Jeanne Moreau Movies
One of the most recognizable faces of the French cinema, and also one of its most celebrated, Jeanne Moreau is a legend in her own right. Combining off-kilter beauty with strong character, Moreau came to embody forthright, devil-may-care sensuality in such films as Jules and Jim and The Bride Wore Black. Comparing her to some of her best-known colleagues, Ginette Vincendeau noted, "Where Brigitte Bardot was sex and Catherine Deneuve elegance, Moreau incarnated intellectual femininity."Born in Paris on January 23, 1928, Moreau was the daughter of an English dancer and a French barman who divorced when she was eleven. Growing up in Nazi-occupied Paris, she began to discover her love of literature and the theatre, and, opposing her father's wishes, she decided to become an actress. While still a student at the Paris Conservatoire, Moreau made her stage debut at the 1947 Avignon Theatre Festival. Shortly thereafter, she was invited to join the prestigious Comédie-Française, becoming on her twentieth birthday the youngest full-time member in the company's history. She stayed with the company for four years, appearing in almost all of their productions during that time. She left in 1951, finding it too restrictive and authoritarian, and joined the more experimental Théâtre Nationale Populaire.
During this time, Moreau began to take bit parts in various films, particularly B-movie melodramas. Initially not considered attractive enough to be a movie star--thanks in part to her lack of interest in make-up--she was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a director who found her natural attributes to be just what he was looking for: Louis Malle, who directed the actress in her breakthrough film, the New Wave murder mystery Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows) (1957). Following this film, Moreau remained Malle's favorite actress and off-screen lover for the next several years. The pair made headlines with their 1959 collaboration, Les Amants (The Lovers); the steamy tale of a bored housewife's extramarital affair pushed the boundaries of censorship on its U.S. release and led certain American gossip columnists to tag Moreau "the new Bardot." The actress' biggest international success was as the exuberant, free-spirited heroine of François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962); five years later, she worked again with Truffaut, starring as an icy murderess in the popular Hitchcock homage The Bride Wore Black (1967). Throughout the 1960s, Moreau worked with some of the cinema's most notable directors, collaborating with Peter Brooks on the 1960 Moderato Cantabile (for which she won a Best Female Performance award at the Cannes Film Festival), Michelangelo Antonioni on La Notte (1961), and Luis Buñuel on Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre.
Throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Moreau continued to work regularly, largely forgoing Hollywood fare in favor of European films. She made some of her more notable appearances in Bertrand Blier's Les Valseuses (1974), Luc Besson's La femme Nikita (1990), and Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World (1991). She also played minor but pivotal roles in The Lover (1992), to which she lent her sandpaper-and-whisky voice as the narrator; Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds (1995), in which she appeared with Marcello Mastroianni in one of his last roles; and Ever After (1998), one of her few Hollywood outings.
Linked romantically with dozens of high-profile men over the decades, Moreau was for a brief period married to Exorcist director William Friedkin. In addition to her acting pursuits, Moreau put her talents to use behind the camera, directing Lumière (1976) and L'adolescente (1979). She has also served twice as the president of the Cannes FIlm Festival jury (1975 and 1995) and has won a number of honors, including a Golden Lion for career achievement at the 1991 Venice Film Festival and a 1997 European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
The Lover is director Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Marguerite Duras' minimalist 1984 novel. Set in French Indochina in 1929, the film explores the erotic charge of forbidden love. Jane March plays a French teenager sent to a Saigon boarding school, while Tony Leung is a 32-year Chinese aristocrat. They look at each and they both see a blinding white flash; it's kismet. He offers her a ride in his limousine and soon they meet in his "bachelor room" where they revel in a wide variety of creative sexual encounters. However, they both realize their love is doomed. She comes from a troubled family that includes a mentally-disturbed mother (Frederique Meininger) and drug-addicted brother (Arnaud Giovaninetti). It also appears that her family would not approve of an interracial tryst. But then neither would his family, since in order to inherit his father's wealth, he must not break from a traditional Chinese arranged marriage. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jane March, Tony Leung Kar-Fai, (more)
- 1992
In this affectionate feature, an adult child of a functional family recollects his largely satisfactory childhood in Paris in the 1960s. The large apartment Pierre grew up in not only housed his parents and himself, but his mother's aged mother and his grandfather. In addition, the premises serve as offices for the two men's general medicine and acupuncture practice. The boy's grandmother is a particular favorite of his, and in one of the more moving flashbacks of the film she is shown preparing the boy to understand her impending death. Another fond reminiscence concerns the uproar the boy's household undergoes as they prepare to receive the American film star Tony Perkins into the doctors' offices for an acupuncture treatment. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jeanne Moreau, François Cluzet, (more)
- 1992
In this aimless and meandering film, five separate individuals drop out of their lives in order to drift around Europe with no clear end in mind. Despite the diversity of the individuals beginning these journeys, the film apparently offers no appealing characters, incidents, or insights, as it was reportedly very coldly received by even by the usually more sympathetic audiences of the 1992 Venice Film Festival, as very few stayed through to its ending. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Alex Descas, Bruno Ganz, (more)
- 1991
- NR
Originally Vielle qui Marchait dans la Mer, this elegiac French comedy is also known as The Old Lady Who Wades in the Sea. Based on a novel by San-Antonio (Frederic Dard), the film stars Jeanne Moreau as an ageing beauty, living with her travelling companion (and ex-lover) Michel Serrault in Guadeloupe. Though forced to hobble about with a cane, Moreau's infirmities do not slow her down in her chosen profession: con artist. She and Serrault have been responsible for some of the most ingenious swindles and extortion schemes in recent memory. While taking her morning walk on the seashore, Moreau is robbed by handsome young Luc Thullier. Not in the least outraged, she senses great potential in the boy, and begins training him for major robbery-while Serrault seethes in comic jealousy. The W.C. Fields-like terms of endearment bandied about between Moreau and Serrault will either charm or annoy you; we liked it. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jeanne Moreau, Michel Serrault, (more)
- 1991
Four countries-France, Greece, Italy and Switzerland-converged upon the production of Suspended Step of Stork. The film is set on the Greek border, where a steady stream of refugees flows on a perpetual basis. Reporter Gregory Karr thinks that he's spotted a familiar face among the anonymous throngs. It is the face of Marcello Mastroianni, cast as a politician who has long been missing and assumed dead. Karr takes it upon himself to repatriate the woebegone Mastroianni, starting with a reunion between the ex-politico and his reluctant wife Jeanne Moreau. Cowritten by director Angelopoulos, Tonio Guerra and Petros Markaris, this moving contemporary drama was originally titled To Meteoro Vima Tou Pelargoli. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, (more)
- 1991
- R
Wim Wenders' sprawling cyberpunk noir epic -- shot in no less than nine different countries -- is set in 1999 and stars Solveig Dommartin as Claire, a young Frenchwoman who comes into contact with a large sum of money stolen during a bank heist; in her travels she picks up a mysterious American hitchhiker (William Hurt), who himself steals some of the money before parting from her company. Upon discovering the theft, Claire sets out on his trail, with both a Hammett-styled German private eye (Rudiger Vogler) as well as her former lover, a novelist portrayed by Sam Neill, in tow. The hitchhiker is really Sam Farber, the son of an underground scientist (Max Von Sydow), and his mission is to travel the globe in order to acquire the funding necessary to develop the technology which will allow his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau) to "see" visual recordings of her family members; the second half of the film takes place largely in the Farbers' compound in the Australian Outback, where Sam, Claire and the others take refuge while attempting to bring the sight project to its fruition, in the meantime pondering earth's future in the wake of a nuclear disaster in outer space. Wenders' most ambitious film to date, budgeted at $23 million, Until the End Of the World is also among his most seriously flawed efforts -- despite a keen sense of cultural perception, a fascinating sci-fi take on life in the near-future and stunning Robby Muller cinematography, the picture never quite gels. Much of the blame seems to fall upon its distributors -- upon its wide release in 1991, the movie was drastically cut to a running time of 2 1/2 hours, resulting in a disjointed narrative that doesn't shift gears so much as grind them as the action moves from country to country. Still, while a three-hour version, issued on laserdisc in Japan, comes closer to realizing the full scope of Wenders' epic vision, rumors of a five-hour director's cut -- said to have been screened to thunderous applause at a handful of film festivals -- continue to persist, suggesting that a masterpiece may well exist here after all. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin, (more)
- 1990
Alberto's family traditions are quite unusual. Living in Paris with his pregnant wife, he is now expected to return to Rome to pay back every cent that his family spent raising him. Totally without the kind of money expected of him, as Alberto speeds by train toward his family he tries to raise the cash by various desperate means from the other passengers aboard the train so he will not have to face his father empty-handed. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Sergio Castellitto, Nino Manfredi, (more)
The serpentine plotline of Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita begins its 117-minute slither when punkish, psychotic, and drug-ridden Nikita (Anne Parillaud) fires her gun into a cop's face following the stick-up of a drug store, and is promptly imprisoned. She is thrown into a dank cell, then injected with a substance and told it is a lethal toxin. Instead of dying, however, the comes to in an all-white interrogation room, where French intelligence officer Bob (Tchéky Karyo), informs her that an alternate to execution exists: she can receive covert government training as an assassin. She accepts the bid, is rigorously trained, and later returns to society as a seemingly normal and gentle civilian, but falls in love with a drugstore employee while she's waiting for that first government assignment. The paradoxical concept of a young woman blossoming socially while carrying out cold-blooded murders was downplayed when La Femme Nikita was remade in America as the silly and disappointing Point of No Return, directed by John Badham with Bridget Fonda in the lead. A far less sociopathic TV-series version of La Femme Nikita surfaced on the USA cable network in early 1997. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Anne Parillaud, Jean-Hugues Anglade, (more)
- 1990
Except for the millionaire film producer, who undoubtedly only gets what he deserves, in this bedroom comedy almost everyone else on a luxury cruise liner headed for Mykonos seems to be having a good time with someone new. Doria (Jeanne Moreau) is a famed but aging opera singer whose career is necessarily drawing to a close: she is the top-billed entertainer for the voyage. Olga (Désirée Nosbusch) is the film producer's latest nubile discovery, Eric (Daniel Mesguich) is a journalist with a way with words and a weird new wife, and Andreas (Anthony Delon) is a handsome young man who is "available." He's quite available, actually, since he's a gigolo, but he finds himself quite passionate about his newest client. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jeanne Moreau, Jacqueline Maillan, (more)
- 1986
Insurance investigator Ronald Fox Terrier (Michel Serrault) looks into a questionable claim of disability feigned by Papu (Jean Poiret) in this situation comedy. When both men are dunked into the waters at a holy shrine, the faking Papu finds himself unable to get out of his wheelchair, while Ronald's mute voice is miraculously restored. Terrier has an affair with the vamp Sabine (Jeanne Moreau) before returning home to his emotionally detached wife (Sylvie Joly). ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Michel Serrault, Jean Poiret, (more)
- 1986
Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Ania Francos, this tragi-comedy follows the diagnosis and internment of lawyer Lola Friedlander (Carole Laure) in the cancer ward of a large clinic. There Lola encounters Marie-Aude (Jeanne Moreau) and Cathy (Dominique Labourier), two very different patients from opposite walks of life who each contribute to Lola's adjustment. Given that the doctor at this clinic is a media-star, there is a certain aura of unreality to the story that also permeates some of the episodes involving subsidiary characters like Lola's boyfriend or her archetypal Jewish family. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Carole Laure, Sami Frey, (more)
- 1986
With ingenious camera work, witty dialogue, and a setting that almost never wanders from the cavernous interior of a mod cafe-bar, this drama by Michel Deville has a lot of pluses. A woman (Jeanne Moreau) and a man (Michel Piccoli, the "nonentity" of the title) jointly run the vast cafe and every night play host to the same four men as they sit around a card table -- a doctor, a journalist, a merchant, and a professor. A seductive woman (Fanny Ardant) lounges around in a hammock nearby. When the police commissioner starts investigating a murder, the four card players become suspects. Charming bits show an irritable "paltoquet" shoving the opening credits off the screen so the story can get going. He also sits around reading the novel from which the screenplay was adapted and provides music with a portable record player. These inventive touches allow the movie to work on several levels at once. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Michel Piccoli, Jeanne Moreau, (more)
- 1985
A tribute to the late, great French director Francois Truffaut, this documentary was undoubtedly named after his last movie, Vivement Dimanche, released in 1983. Included in this overview of Truffaut's contribution to filmmaking are clips from 14 of his movies arranged according to the themes he favored. These include childhood, literature, the cinema itself, romance, marriage, and even death (The Green Room). Of lesser notice in this documentary is the life of the man himself. There are some scenes of his receiving an award or two and some interview footage, but nothing extensive. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- 1984
Interviewed in her charming New York apartment at the age of 88, the indomitable Lillian Gish (her last name an Anglicized version of Guiche), comes across as the knowledgeable, talented, and beguiling woman of her many publicity releases. Gish recounts how she and her sister Dorothy first started working for D.W. Griffith after Mary Pickford, their former collegue in New York, persuaded Griffith to add both Gish sisters to his repertory. Gish goes on to talk about her first, popular movies with Griffith - such as the racist, radical, and cinematically brilliant Birth of a Nation. A few personal bits of information are revealed in the interview, such as the fact that when Griffith took Dorothy and Lillian, as well as their mother Mary on location in England in 1918 to film Hearts of the World, Mary Gish's health declined and she never fully recovered (she died in 1948). If French actress and director Jeanne Moreau had focused on similarly untapped areas of the great thespian's life, the documentary would have been all the more interesting. As it stands, Gish still carries the show with ease and grace. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lillian Gish, Jeanne Moreau, (more)
A sailor learns to take, and give, it like a man in this surrealistic adaptation of writer and thief Jean Genet's novel Querelle de Brest by avant-garde German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In a colorful brothel in the port of Brest, proprietor Nono (Gunther Kaufmann) is known for wagering with his customers. Win a throw of the dice, and they get to make love with his wife, Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau); lose, and they must take it from behind by Nono himself. One day, Lysiane reads the tarot for her lover, Robert (Hanno Poschl), and learns in the cards of his intense passion for his brother, Querelle (Brad Davis). Querelle himself soon arrives, and the brothers enact a bizarre greeting halfway between a hug and a wrestling match. Querelle, it seems, is looking for partners in a drug deal; Robert points him in the right direction. An argument about the merits of sex between men soon leads Querelle to murder his fellow smuggler, Vic (Dieter Schidor). Back at the whorehouse, Querelle loses on purpose to Nono and finds he has a taste for passive gay sex. Meanwhile, fellow sailor Gil, who looks exactly like Querelle's brother (and is played by the same actor), murders one of his compatriots after the brute publicly impugns his manhood. Wanted by the police for both his own crime and Querelle's, Gil goes on the lam. Querelle soon crashes his hideout, and an intense bond develops between the two murderers -- a friendship that will lead Querelle to the greatest love, and the greatest treachery, of his life. Director Fassbinder was in the process of editing Querelle when he died of a drug overdose in June 1982. Gunther Kaufmann, who plays Nono, was Fassbinder's ex-lover; the film is dedicated to another former lover, El Hedi Ben Salem, the news of whose suicide had just reached the director. Critically derided even by many of Fassbinder's admirers, Querelle earned a Golden Raspberry award for Worst "Original" Song for "Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves," an Oscar Wilde poem set to music by Peer Raben and sung repeatedly by Jeanne Moreau. Moreau had previously starred in Mademoiselle, a Tony Richardson effort co-scripted by Genet. Look for Frank Ripploh, another pioneering German director, in a cameo. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Brad Davis, Franco Nero, (more)
- 1982
German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder died of a drug overdose on June 10, 1982, before his last film, Querelle was edited. This documentary is both about the filming of Querelle -- a sailor of that name whose love life left nothing to be desired -- and about director Fassbinder's working techniques and philosophy. While actors and workers comment on the filming of Querelle, a 14-minute interview with Fassbinder taped eight hours before he died was supposed to convey the first element, his own beliefs and working methods. Fassbinder's mother had the interview pulled by court order, leaving the Wizard of Babylon without the benefit of the wizard's own chemistry. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jeanne Moreau, (more)
This French sex farce is translated in English as The Trout. Joseph Losey directed and co-wrote the film, which stars Isabelle Huppert as Frederique, a young woman living on her family's rural trout farm. Frederique is trapped in a dull marriage to a rube. She decides to leave him and the trout farm for the city; she wants to make her living in the financial sector. She ends up in a cutthroat corporate world and meets up with the sophisticated Lou (the legendary Jeanne Moreau). Frederique finds herself trading sexual favors for corporate advancement and becoming more deeply involved in a complicated series of business dealings. Eventually, she longs for a return to her simpler life on the trout farm. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Moreau, (more)
- 1981
- R
Sexual obsession provides the basis of this taut thriller, an adaptation of a Romain Gary novel. The story centers upon a prominent financier who must fight to save his crumbling business empire and his rapidly fading manhood. The obsession begins when the impotent magnate begins dreaming that a handsome gypsy is making love to his much younger girlfriend. He cannot get the dream out of his head and so goes to a Parisian madam to see if he can make the fantasy real. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Richard Harris, Jeanne Moreau, (more)
- 1981
A young jounalist (Patrick Dewaere) stumbles across something much more sinister than a simple suicide in the death of a politician - the death seems to be an assassination contrived by an American multinational company intent on taking over several French industries. The journalist's objective is to garner enough evidence to expose the American corporation for what it really is, before French companies start disappearing - and before any more corpses accumulate, including his own. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Patrick Dewaere, Caroline Cellier, (more)
- 1980
- R
In his final film before taking his own life, Patrick Dewaere stars as Serge, a writer whose life is disrupted by an affair with the enigmatic Carol (Clio Goldsmith). ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Patrick Dewaere, Clio Goldsmith, (more)
- 1978
L'Adolescente (The Adolescent) was the second directorial stint for French film star Jeanne Moreau. This possibly autobiographical piece is set during the early war years. Laetitia Chauveau plays a twelve-year old girl whose future is determined by the events of one long summer holiday in the country in the period just before the outbreak of the Second World War. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Laetitia Chauveau, Simone Signoret, (more)
Elia Kazan directed this curiously constipated film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished final novel, about Monroe Starr, a brilliant and efficient studio executive (based upon Fitzgerald's experiences with MGM wunderkind Irving Thalberg). Robert De Niro plays Monroe Starr in a cool and detached manner, and as Kazan pans around the Hollywood Dream Factory of the 1930s, Starr juggles several productions, deals with nervous actors and recalcitrant directors, stays afloat in the Hollywood corporate battlefields, and secretly carries on a love affair with an even cooler and more detached English girl, Kathleen Moore (Ingrid Boulting). ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, (more)
- 1976
Actress Jeanne Moreau made her directorial debut with this tale about a gathering of actresses who, over the course of an all-night conversation, come to reassess their careers and romantic lives. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Francine Racette, Jeanne Moreau, (more)
