Pierre Brasseur

After causing an accident that disfigures his daughter face, a Paris surgeon’s futile plan to fix it involves transplanting skin from kidnapped women.

The last of the celebrated collaborations between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert (CHILDREN OF PARADISE) unfolds in a dreamily beautiful vision of a wintry, nocturnal Paris shortly after the city’s postwar liberation. It’s there that Jean Diego (Yves Montand in one of his first film roles), a former member of the French underground Resistance, has an encounter with destiny as he meets a long-lost comrade, villains of the war, a prophetic tramp, and a beautiful woman who will draw him into an inexorable tragedy. A richly allegorical evocation of a country reckoning with the guilt and national trauma of World War II and the occupation, LES PORTES DE LA NUIT (“The Gates of the Night”) was a tough sell for postwar audiences looking for escapism, but it can now be appreciated for both its haunting atmosphere and unique fusion of poetic fantasy and bitter reality.

Wonderbird aids a chimney sweep and his beloved shepherdess in this incredible animated classic adventure for the whole family to enjoy.

During World War I, Scottish soldier Private Plumpick is sent on a mission to a village in the French countryside to disarm a bomb set by the retreating German army. Plumpick encounters a strange town occupied by the former residents of the local psychiatric hospital who escaped after the villagers deserted.

Poetic realism reached sublime heights with CHILDREN OF PARADISE, widely considered one of the greatest French films of all time. This nimble depiction of nineteenth-century Paris’s theatrical demimonde, filmed during World War II, follows a mysterious woman (Arletty) loved by four different men (all based on historical figures): an actor, a criminal, a count, and, most poignantly, a mime (Jean-Louis Barrault, in a longing-suffused performance for the ages). With sensitivity and dramatic élan, director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert resurrect a world teeming with hucksters and aristocrats, thieves and courtesans, pimps and seers.

Roving with his dazzlingly mobile camera around the decadent ballrooms, bucolic countryside retreats, urban bordellos, and painter's studios of late nineteenth-century French life, Max Ophuls brings his astonishing visual dexterity and storytelling bravura to this triptych of tales by Guy de Maupassant about the limits of spiritual and physical pleasure. Featuring a stunning cast of French stars (including Danielle Darrieux, Jean Gabin, and Simone Simon), Le plaisir pinpoints the cruel ironies and happy compromises of life with a charming and sophisticated breeziness.