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A master of suspense admired even by Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clouzot is famous for acid-tinged thrillers about cold-blooded murder and ugly politics, whether in a French town or a Latin American oil field. But his early writing career was quite different: he provided the scenarios and dialogue for ten years’ worth of clever farces and affecting melodramas, often with musical numbers.

Clouzot The Early Works

Blu-ray

My Cousin from Warsaw, Dragnet Night, The Unknown Singer, I’ll Be Alone After Midnight, The Terror of Batignolles, Tell Me Tonight, Dream Castle

Kino Lorber Kino Classics

1931- 1933 / B&W / 1:33 flat full frame / 511 min.

Street Date November 20, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 59.95

Written by Henri-Georges Clouzot

If one digs into older movies away from the usual standard titles, the history of filmmaking opens up like a grand epic. All those acknowledged French masterpieces of the 1930s weren’t necessarily the popular norm. Just as in America,...

Ramon Novarro: Mexican-born actor was first Latin American Hollywood superstar Mexican-born actor Ramon Novarro, the original Ben-Hur and one of MGM’s biggest stars of the late ’20s and early ’30s, has his Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" day on Thursday, August 8, 2013. First, The Bad News: TCM will not be presenting any Ramon Novarro movie premieres. And that’s quite disappointing. (Photo: Ramon Novarro ca. 1925.) There’ll be no The Midshipman (1925), the first time Novarro was billed above the title (back then the official recognition of True Stardom) and featuring one of Joan Crawford’s earliest film appearances, or Forbidden Hours (1928), a vapid but great-looking The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg redux, with the always charming Renée Adorée as the commoner loved by His Majesty, Michael IV — that’s Novarro. Excellent prints of The Midshipman and Forbidden Hours can be found in the Warner Bros. film...

Certainly there are lots of books which have been filmed far more times than Pierre Louÿs' The Woman and the Puppet, but his book has the distinction of having formed the basis for four widely varying masterpieces, or so I'd argue.

The book, in which a poor factory girl drives a middle-aged nobleman to sexual distraction by incessantly leading him on, then spurning him, became Buñuel's final film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Famously, Don Luis cast two actresses in the role of the schizoid heroine, but declined to follow standard logic by having one play consistently hot, the other cold.

Only slightly less celebrated is Josef von Sternberg's last Dietrich vehicle, The Devil is a Woman (1935), flaunting the Production Code by having Dietrich tease two men to the point of murder, and blithely get away with it. Her victims are Lionel Atwill and Cesar Romero (real-life...