Two Men in Town and Five Day Lover Restoration Trailers
Posted April 16, 2015 05:10 PM by Webmaster
The Cohen Media Group has sent us trailers for the recent restorations of Philippe de Broca's Five Day Lover (1961), starring Jean Seberg, Micheline Presle, and Jean-Pierre Cassel, and José Giovanni's Two Men in Town (1973), starring Jean Gabin, Alain Delon, Mimsy Farmer, Victor Lanoux, and Cécile Vassort.
The two restorations will be screened at the COLCOA French Film Festival in Los Angeles.
Five Day Lover and Two Men in Town are expected to arrive on Blu-ray later this year.
A hard-boiled crime drama and an impassioned indictment of capital punishment, Two Men in Town is the third and final on-screen collaboration between Jean Gabin (Grand Illusion; Pepe Le Moko), France's pre-eminent film star, and '70s Gallic anti-hero Alain Delon (Flic Story; Purple Noon). After an early release arranged by prison reformer Germain Cazeneuve (Gabin), ex-safe cracker Gino Strabliggi (Delon) is devastated by personal tragedy and banned, by statue, from returning to Paris. At Cazeneuve's urging, Gino makes a new start in the south of France, finds honest work as a printer and new love in the form of Lucie (Mimsy Farmer - More), a beautiful bank officer. But when vengeful cops start to stalk him, and Gino's ex-gang starts eyeing Lucy's bank, Gino's determination to go straight is pushed to the breaking point.
Written and directed by author Jose Giovanni (Le Trou), a real pardoned death row inmate, Two Men in Town fuses the two-fisted social commentary of Warner Bros' 1930s heyday with the naturalistic storytelling of '70s French noir cinema. Two Men in Town features a hauntingly evocative score by Phillipe Sarde (The Tenant). New 4K restoration.
By 1961, thanks to Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Jean Seberg was the embodiment of the modern liberated woman in French New Wave circles. She carries that mantle into this gauzy romp as Claire, a romantically adventurous wife and mother who meets Antoine, a carefree womanizer, at a fashion show hosted by Claire's best friend Madeleine. Claire welcomes Antoine's advances, and they are soon enjoying weekday afternoon assignations at Antoine's swanky bachelor pad, despite the little detail that the winsome Antoine happens to be Madeleine's kept lover. Claire doesn't seem to mind deceiving Madeleine, or even leaving her staid husband at home to watch the kids. What really bothers her is the fact that Antoine is beginning to talk about marriage.
There has been something of a reassessment of the early work of writer/director Philippe de Broca in recent years. Between his big budget blockbusters like Swords of Blood (1962) starring frequent collaborator Jean-Paul Belmondo, and his adventure comedies like That Man From Rio (1964), de Broca's light-hearted romantic comedies have often been overlooked. Co-written with Daniel Boulanger, Five Day Lover was the last of three such films that de Broca made just after working as an assistant to Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut. Although these films bear only a stylish resemblance to the classic works of the Nouvelle Vague, they freeze-frame the mores of a sexual revolution that appears charmingly naïve in retrospect. In 1966, de Broca wrote and directed King of Hearts, a personal film that was a commercial disappointment at the time, but is now widely considered to be his masterpiece. De Broca continued to make films, mostly comedies, until his death in 2004. One of his last films, On Guard, premiered at COLCOA 1998. New 2K restoration. (Synopsis courtesy of COLCOA).