Georges Rouquier Movies

French director George Rouqier's companion piece to his 1938 film Farrebique was, to put it mildly, long overdue--some 35 years, to be exact. In Biquefarre, the set-in-its-ways rural family whose farm was wired for electricity in the first film are still on the family spread in 1983. This time, the plot concerns the plans of a farmer to sell his his land to another. Though documentary in technique, the film is well planned and scripted, with its amateur cast convincingly mouthing the lines given them by Rouqier. Biquefarre will probably hold its greatest appeal to fans of "naturalist" filmmaker Robert Flaherty, whom George Rouqier clearly admires and emulates. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this story of the perfect crime that goes wrong, Jeff (Georges Rouquier) is the mastermind who has planned a successful robbery. When he fails to show up for the job, his girlfriend and his young protégé Laurent (Alain Delon) are put under guard to wait for the boss to arrive. Laurent manages to overpower the guard and escapes with Jeff's girl. An exciting chase scene through a zoo ends in a gunfight and one of the thugs being stung to death by a bevy of bees. In the final dénouement, Jeff and Laurent face each other down in a battle for all the money. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Deux Crimes d'Amour (Two Love Crimes) is comprised of two separate, but thematically linked, short films. "Mina de Vangel," directed by Maurice Clavel and Maurice Barry, is based on a novelette by Stendhal (The Red and the Black), wherein a starry-eyed German lass (Odile Versois), betrayed by a French roue, vainly tries to find happiness with a decent man (Alain Cuny) for whom she works as a domestic. The second film is the award-winning "Le Rideau Cramoisi" ("The Scarlet Curtain"), adapted from a short novel by Barbey D'Aurevilly and directed by Alexandre Astruc. When a Napoleonic soldier (Jean-Claude Pascal) is billeted with a French family, all social proprieties are observed--a first. But a chance physical contact with the enigmatic daughter (Anouk Aimee) of the household leads to a torrid romance, which in turn leads to tragedy. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Farrebique, the first feature-length effort of French documentary filmmaker Georges Rouqier, is widely regarded as his finest film. Rouqier concentrates on a single French farm family, following them through the four seasons. As in the works of Robert Flaherty, the human characters and the land surrounding them are "one", and Rouqier never misses an opportunity to parallel their lives with the eons-old phases of nature. The final symbolic images of Spring, achieved through time-lapse photography, are almost unbearingly beautiful. The winner of several festival awards, Farrebique nonetheless did not immediately result in an outpouring of financing for Rouqier's follow-up films (this was a common problem in the financially strapped French film industry of the 1940s). Perhaps as a result, Rouqier did not make his sequel, Biquefarre (filmed in the same region, with some of the same "actors"), until 1983! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide