A Friend Will Come Tonight + Not Guilty
PART ONE of FRENCH ’24 comes to a rousing conclusion with two films featuring one of the most unique actors in film history—Michel Simon, the towering epitome of that uniquely French creation known as the monstre sacré (sacred monster).
A Friend Will Come Tonight / Un ami viendra ce soir
7:00 PM Just what is going on in that strange insane asylum located on the outskirts of Paris? What kind of misdirection is afoot as rumblings of a knockout punch to the occupying Nazis begin to circulate? Could there be a method behind the madness that Michel Simon and others (among them Madeleine Sologne, Paul Bernard, Louis Salou, and Saturnin Fabre) continue to foreground until a certain time on a certain evening? Is this liberation, or is this lunacy? Director Raymond Bernard, past his top-of-the-mountain achievements with LES MISÉRABLES, proves he still has plenty left in the tank as he promises you that A FRIEND WILL COME TONIGHT… (1946, dir, Raymond Bernard, 92m)
Not Guilty / Non coupable
9:00 PM Feigning madness is one thing—but going mad is something else entirely! And there is no one who can go mad the way Michel Simon does it in NOT GUILTY. A dissolute drunk of a doctor in a dismal part of the French provinces, Simon’s character accidentally kills a pedestrian one night as he and his mistress (Jany Holt) are driving home. When he fails to confess and the murder goes unsolved, something snaps inside him and he enters a “serial killer fugue state” where he believes he can kill with impunity…but then he starts to crave recognition for his series of unsolved crimes!
Director Henri Decoin and scenarist Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon devise one of noir’s strangest (and strangely exhilarating) excursions into the dark pit of lunacy with this one. Only its third screening in America…and guess who screened it the other two times! (1947, dir. Henri Decoin, 95m)
Midcentury Productions’ THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT ’24- Part One features 14 rarely seen films, adding to the astonishing rediscoveries that the series has been unearthing since 2014. Seven spectacular films—including a landmark screening of the 1934 version of France’s LES MISÉRABLES—are highlighted in the Big Roxie on October 3rd, 6th and 7th, while seven even deeper dives into “the lost continent” play in the Little Roxie screening room on October 4th and 5th.
► Sales for all-festival passes for Part One are now sold out. For the best currently available discount pricing, you are urged to consider purchasing our Big Roxie Pass that covers all seven films screening in the big theater Thursday, Sunday, and Monday for $60.
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