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Le Grand Échiquier is a French variety television program created and presented by Jacques Chancel. It aired at 8:30 pm on the first channel of the ORTF from January 12, 1972 to July 12, 1972, then on the second color channel of the ORTF from September 1972 to December 1974, and finally on Antenne 2 from January 1975 to December 21, 1989. The program returned to France 2 on December 20, 2018 and is hosted by Anne-Sophie Lapix.
Two seemingly happily married French couples are forced to contend with a number of issues.
Lepetit, an ambitious and determined man, is named the new CEO of a department store. His mission is to improve the store's financial position. He decides that the human factor will be his catchword and introduces new methods, which he also applied to himself. But tensions slowly arise between members of the staff.
In this film that sends up the foibles of filmmaking, a standard crew of actors, stage-hands, director, writers, producers, and others are gathered for the filming of a 45-second automobile commercial. Each role embodies an archetype (the harried director who has a deadline to meet, the Scrooge production manager who has a budget to meet, and the writers who are above these mundane concerns), and these personalities drive the working actors over the edge until they decide to lock them up and do their own thing -- happiness can be just around the corner if you are in the driver's seat. Hopefully, the actors will be able to bow out before the police catch on to the situation.
A traveller who has lost his passport in a Paris airport while between flights is restricted to a special transit zone. There he finds a group of similarly lost people hiding out and living from hand-to-mouth, reliant on their ingenuity to survive.
International singing sensation Ute Lemper performs in German, French and English in this tour-de-force concert, recorded in 1992 at Paris' Les Bouffes du Nord. The versatile chanteuse -- whose style ranges from sultry to haunting -- wows the crowd with a variety of favorites. The set list includes "Lady in the Dark," "Knickerbocker Holiday," "Das Berliner Requiem," "Lost in the Stars," "The Firebrand of Florence," "One Touch of Venus" and more.
In this routine drama, two men (a crass Brit and a slow Frenchman) decide to evade the war in 1917, but their flight on a stolen boat goes awry and they end up on the coast of France, close to the fighting they wanted to leave behind. Once on shore, they make the acquaintance of a like-minded young widow who begins an affair with both men (she just wants to have a child by each) -- but their unusually idyllic existence is threatened with imminent tragedy as the French army advances ever closer.
