The Other Side of "The Lost Continent" 2023

The Fantastic Night + The Chips Are Down

  • The Fantastic Night
  • The Chips Are Down
  • The Chips Are Down

FRANCES’ LAST GREAT CLASSIC STAR! TRIBUTE TO MICHELINE PRESLE…

The Fantastic Night / La nuit fantastique

4:45 PM Silent film giant Marcel L’Herbier struggled to regain his form in the sound era, but he hit his stride with La nuit fantastique, in which a harried laborer (Fernand Gravey) discovers an alluring world in his dreams with a dream-girl (Micheline Presle) beset by a sinister, magic-practicing uncle (a wonderfully diabolical Saturnine Fabre). L’Heriber pulls out all the stops in this superbly surreal fantasy that will make you wonder if you’re awake or dreaming what you’re seeing on screen! (1942, Marcel L’Herbier, 103 min)

The Chips Are Down / Les jeux sont faits

6:45 PM The wonderful Micheline Presle is the last great star of the “cinéma de papa” period to still be with us today (she turned 100 last August), and here, in MCP executive director Don Malcolm’s favorite of all the films he’s brought back to American screens, she is at her most brilliant as the martyred wife of a dictator’s lackey who poisons her in order to marry her more pliant sister.

In the afterlife, she meets and falls in love with a murdered resistance leader (Marcel Pagliero) and, in this noir fantasy, the couple are allowed to return to earth to right the wrongs against them—so long as their love remains intact. Can they turn things back or will they be tripped up by fate? With a screenplay by the noted existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Les jeux sont faits is utterly, triumphantly unique. (1947, Jean Delannoy, 92 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 ProductionsThe 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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Runtime
3h 15m
Format
Digital
Country
fr
Language
In French with English subtitles