Acting
La Venus D'Or (Golden Venus) was based on Business, a play by Pierre Sabatier. Mirielle Balin stars as Judith, the mistress of ruthless oil magnate Harfstrong. What Harfstrong doesn't know is that Judith is a spy for his hated business rival. When he does find out, he cannot get rid of her because she knows too much about his own crooked dealings. After several more reels of mutual betrayal and recriminations, the story suddenly shifts to the "good" characters, clean-limned young pilot Andre and his sweetheart Michelle. Set up as a fall guy for the villains, Andre somehow emerges from the experience none the worse for wear.
In Central Europe, an organization of counterfeiters is headed by Burcq. An Air France pilot introduces an intelligence agent to the principality. A woman, Helene, betrays them first, then in love with Francois, the pilot, helps the two friends to escape.
"Merlusse" is French schoolboy slang for codfish, and M. Blanchard, a professor at a certain lycée, was known to his victims by that name. On Christmas Eve, when some twenty of the students—orphans, foreigners or just plain "unwanteds"—had to remain in the boarding school, Merlusse is placed in charge. His glass eye glares at them stonily, his good one with no less severity. He sets them to tasks, marches like a proctor up and down the aisles, exacts to the utmost the last measure of discipline. But when the youngsters awake in the morning, there are toys by each bed in the dormitory and M. Blanchard, no longer to be called Merlusse, is exposed for the softhearted fraud he is.
Angèle is a 1934 French drama film directed, produced and written by Marcel Pagnol. It stars Orane Demazis as a naive young woman who is seduced and abandoned. It is based on the novel Un de Baumugnes by Jean Giono.
Jofroi sells his orchard to Alphonse. Alphonse wants to use the land for crops, so he starts to cut down the trees. Jofroi is furious: how can someone cut down those trees? He threatens to commit suicide so that the small town will blame Alphonse and Alphonse’s life will be miserable. Alphonse, the curate, the teacher, and some of the townsfolk spend the rest of the movie trying to keep Jofroi from committing suicide…
Jacques, a young reporter, is in charge of covering the International Youth Meeting in Warsaw. He falls in love with a young participant, Mireille, who returns his love. The joy of the lovebirds is on a par with the general glee. But during a walk, they discover the ruins of the ghetto where so many victims of Nazism died. On a more intimate level, a serious problem of conscience arises for Jacques.
A young queer filmmaker invokes his deceased father to have an intimate dialogue about the men of their family. After he passed away, his estranged uncle Sergio, a lonely jaguar hunter living in isolation, invited him to spend some days in the untamed Costa Rican wilderness. Deep within nature, the men embark on a journey of self-discovery and forgiveness as they confront the inherited violence of their masculinity.
