MARIO GAUCI This was Oscar-nominated in the "Best Writing, Motion Picture Story" category at the ceremony selecting the winning movies released in the U.S. during 1956; ironically, it was given in the name of celebrated author Jean-Paul Sartre – who, however, appears nowhere among the credits (but is then prominently displayed on native posters)…because the screenplay of the finished film was an adaptation of an unpublished one he had written back in 1944 (called "Typhus")! For the record, it was also awarded the Bronze Lion at the Venice Film Festival. A Franco- Mexican production set in the latter country, the dialogue alternates between French and Spanish throughout; indeed, translations in the former language are given for most of the Hispanic exchanges – however, these end up interfering with the newly-created English subtitles accompanying the movie for the entire duration! Incidentally, the IMDb lists Portas' alleged co-directing credit here…but, again, this is entirely omitted on the film proper!Anyway, the torrid, crisis-torn setting (which invariably brings together a number of disparate characters) actually recalls a number of excellent contemporaneous French films – H.G. Clouzot's THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953) and two by my favourite auteur Luis Bunuel, DEATH IN THE GARDEN (1956) and REPUBLIC OF SIN (1959), with which this one even shares composer Paul Misraki and leading man Gerard Philipe respectively! In fact, here we deal with a village combating a meningitis epidemic: the local medic (played by Carlos Lopez Moctezuma – who apparently is no relation to Juan, cult director of "Nunsploitation" flick ALUCARDA {1975}) soon has his hands full with patients; Philipe, an ex-French doctor who took to the bottle after his wife died in his own care, helps out while being made a laughing stock of by the inhabitants. The first case is the spouse of elegant French lady Michele Morgan – in the second of five pictures she and Philipe appeared in, though two were compendiums and one a documentary in which the stars were featured as themselves! She takes an instant dislike to her grimy compatriot, yet becomes increasingly dependent on him when her own hubby perishes and the innkeeper forces himself upon her (typically more permissive than comparable Hollywood films of the era, Morgan is repeatedly seen in her underwear on account of the excessive heat) – she also incurs the jealousy of the latter's wife, another French expatriate. Finally, Philipe rekindles his vocation and decides to remain sober – while the heroine, who had intended leaving before a quarantine was ordered sealing off the village from the outside world, opts to stay behind due to her new-found feelings for the male protagonist…The handling is sturdy and the atmosphere vividly rendered, aided in no small measure by the cinematography of Alex Phillips (who had also lensed Bunuel's ASCENT TO HEAVEN and ROBINSON CRUSOE {both 1952}), the production design of Gunther Gerszo (who, apart from Bunuel's SUSANA {1951} and THE RIVER AND DEATH {1955}, would be responsible for several "Mexi-Horror" efforts) and a lively score – accentuated by loud yelps redolent of Latin American nonchalance! – from Misraki (later a collaborator of Orson Welles, not to mention exponents of the "Nouvelle Vague"). That said, there is an odd emphasis on showing its main characters humiliated (and at inordinate length, to boot!): now- penniless Morgan goes to wire her relatives in Paris for money, but she is forced to change pens numerous times because they run out of ink or break and then reduce her message because it exceeds the amount borrowed from the innkeeper!; Philipe, too, is literally made to dance for his share of rum (the drunkard act is slightly overstated, to be sure) – on the other hand, when he has to assist the doc in vaccinating Morgan and ordered to wash his hands, he complains that it will take another eight day's filth to bring them to their current state…but, then, they are cleaned up in no time at all! Another minor quibble: with this type of film, there is usually some questioning of religious faith vis-a'-vis the significance of the plague – but, despite the obligatory presence of a curate, there is little of that feeling here!I had missed out on a solitary screening of the movie under review (which, by the way, finds a place on the "Wonders In The Dark" website's ranking of the all-time top 3000 movies – while the Leonard Maltin guide, where it was listed under the alternate international title THE PROUD ONES, saw fit to raise its rating from *** to ***1/2) on a French Cable TV, where it was broadcast without the benefit of subtitles; normally, the channel concerned at least provided a French transcript of the dialogue – but this practice has long since been dropped! As for director Allegret, it is the fourth (and perhaps best) effort of his that I have watched after DEDEE' D'ANVERS (1948), MANEGES (1950) and LEATHERNOSE (1952); I also own one of his most highly-regarded works, SUCH A PRETTY LITTLE BEACH (1949; also with Philipe)…while I did not take advantage of a late-night scheduling of MIRACLES ONLY HAPPEN ONCE (1951) – and as for the French-Italian anthology THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS (1952; one of the Philipe/Morgan collaborations I alluded to earlier on), it is only readily available via a trimmed Italian print!

richard-1787 I sat through this movie this evening, forcing myself to stick with it even though I never cared about any of the characters or what happened to them, because the two leads, Gérard Philippe and Michèle Morgan, were major film stars of their era and I wanted to see them in "something different," which this certainly was. They both gave fine performances, but of distasteful characters.Indeed, the whole movie is about a shabby little town in Mexico inhabited by almost uniformly distasteful characters (the doctor is, of course, the major exception). What Michèle Morgan ever sees in Philippe to fall in love with him is never explained.This is supposedly based on a work by Jean-Paul Sartre. All I could think was that, if Sartre's work is anything like this movie, it must be a very mediocre attempt at imitating Camus' masterful novel The Plague, which dealt with a plague in North Africa.A well-acted but uninteresting movie.

Cristi_Ciopron I would like to underline here the symbolical place and representative function of this good compact movie. This is how a clear-cut good movie looks. It is a melodrama—and no crap, no ballast, no rubbish. Above all, intelligent, good movie—the obvious touch of a master. In other words, this is what has been lost. This ability, this craftsmanship—very undervalued and despised and underrated. Far from being a masterpiece, this romance is a good movie—what I found particularly satisfying, fulfilling, is the absence of the slapdash, of the mess ;fortunately, in its own time Les Orgueilleux did not pass unnoticed. Leprohon saw its merits.It is a good and important movie—and also a representative of a school—it was called the French School. Those who despised this style of movie-making, of fine movie-making, often had nothing to bring instead. A director like Yves Allégret addressed his films to an intelligent cultivated audience.Before we go on with the explanation of this very fine and achieved melodrama's importance, let us try to see what is the constitutive structure of a melodrama. Of a serious and intelligent one, that is. Of a melodrama that does set itself up for something. The first thing we see, dear reader, is the synthetic and somewhat symbolic (the word is not wholly adequate, and it must be taken under caution) language and content of a melodrama. In this film that we are discussing now one can immediately detect this adequacy of the means—the narrative units, the characters, the psychologies, the mutual relations, the ways, the transitions, are to be taken as merely symbolic (that is, having an immediate aesthetic interest in themselves, and concomitantly standing for a larger meaning that is given in their concrete structure) and synthetic. On the other hand, notice how decently is this made, and how the Mexican characters speaking Spanish are not made to do this by speaking French with a Spanish accent. It might be, this phonetic accuracy, only a modest indication—though, it says much about this movie, and this old French School director, having the right approach and the right understanding and the right respect for the audience.I believe the symbolical, the reflective ,the synthetic and the generic are the only chance of this sort of literature (or cinema)—the non-autobiographical one.All such literature or cinema must choose a synthetic, generic and non-realistic exposition—the choice of the realism for the depicting of the supreme things, such as love and passion, fits only an autobiographic content. In other words, one cannot invent a realistic content for such a fiction—he either speaks strictly about what he has seen and met and lived, or he uses a symbolic, synthetic, compact and non-realistic approach—as is the case with this film. It cures the mind of the stupidity with which today's melodramas imbue the mind of their viewers. This curative function is also important.Les Orgueilleux means several things, on many levels—it means what its author intended it to mean;--but it also means the French School in the '50s, right before the scene was taken over almost completely by puck-fists and crumbs who knew only to pot out, 'potchky around and mess up—pothooks. And it means the level of excellence in simply making a good movie that was reached by these French School old honest directors. Their detractors reproached them they did not make masterpieces (but they often did !), and suggested that once the French School dismissed, a New Wave will come that will constantly produce only masterpieces.Les Orgueilleux is good, simple, clear and dramatic. It is psychological, thrilling and melodramatic. It means much as the witness of an epoch of normality and competence. This narrative and aesthetic competence is something fine and deeply satisfying. The story is simple and average—but it is perfectly mastered and managed, very finely developed, very carefully thought. The several characters are well managed. Philippe makes one of his first-hand roles (I do not know very well his career; anyway, here is his best role that I know, and notable also for being an achieved drunkard role, an usually picturesque specialty that Philippe treats in a different and very competent way.) Like all the very great actors, Philippe makes the viewers think he was the only, and anyway the best choice for the role. So someone might ask: if I praise the movie like this, why don't I declare it a masterpiece? Because it is not—and, more important, it doesn't pretend it is. It is, deliberately and with supreme mastery and equilibrium, a fine melodrama. If it proves something, it's that a fine melodrama can be rich, impressive and compact—this is its achievement, from a historical point of view.The French School directors were clear-sighted, clear-minded ,not at all muddled, maybe somewhat limited but certainly with a compact knowledge of the technical possibilities of their art; moreover, they did not have the cult of the geniality –or, better, the superstition …. Those who replaced the old directors brought sprawl. Someone wrote, very true, that today's melodramas are "patronisingly simplistic, sentimental and tiresome".Indeed.Well,Les Orgueilleux proves there was a time when they didn't have to be so.If you wish, make this test: ask yourself how many recent melodramas seem, next to Les Orgueilleux, anything but crap. I think I could offer several titles of American melodramas from the '50s that are almost as good as Les Orgueilleux, and you may compare the recent melodramas with these '50s American flicks, and the recent ones are still crap—and crap out of crap.

Jennifer Hoagland I saw this movie when it first came out, have not seen it since, but have remembered it vividly all these years. Seldom, if ever, has a film held me riveted the way this one did. Of course, I would have paid to see Michele Morgan read the Manhattan phone book, especially attired in a slip (no, I am not a lezzie). The mood created by the meningitis epidemic in Mexico and the sexual tension, created mostly by Morgan, are more enveloping than real life. This remains one of my top 10 - perhaps top 5 - favorite movies of all time. For the life of me, I cannot understand why there is neither a VHS nor a DVD version available, apparently anywhere. What can be done to rectify this situation? For years, I moaned about the lack of a DVD of The Informer. Now, one is available but only as part of the overpriced John Ford collection of some of his lesser films.Jen