The Old Devil + Samson

EARLY EVENING DOUBLE FEATURE WITH HARRY BAUR!

The Old Devil / Cette vieille canaille

5:15 PM No French film festival from the 1930s is worth its salt without at least two appearances from the great Harry Baur, one of the most unlikely (yet somehow inevitable) giants of cinema. Here he is Vautier, a surgeon who is smitten by a young girl (Alice Field) and pays the girl’s mother in order to marry her. But she falls for a dashing young trapeze artist (Pierre Blanchar) and director Anatole Litvak—shortly to depart for Hollywood—sharpens the angles of his triangle tale to the razor’s edge of no return. (1933, Anatole Litvak, 99 min)

Samson

7:15 PM This time Harry Baur is a copper magnate and the pillar (get it?) of the Paris Stock Exchange who marries (for love) the daughter of a destitute aristocratic family (Gaby Morlay). Just how self-destructive will this “Samson” prove to be when he discovers that she is stepping out on him with one of his own protégés (André Luguet)? (1936, Maurice Tourneur, 90 min)

Thanks to the slow-but-sure rediscovery of “cinema de papa” films in France from the 1930s and 1940s, THE OTHER SIDE OF “THE LOST CONTINENT” 2023 gathers an astonishing range of titles previously forgotten in their homeland and virtually unseen in America. Those who’ve journeyed with us through the hidden landscapes of French noir in Midcentury Productions‘ The French Had a Name for It programs will be similarly enchanted by the 18 films we have in store for you beginning April 1st.

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