Battement de coeur / Beating Heart (1940)
Beating Heart / Battement de coeur (1940)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL | 4:3 | 720x576 | 9000 kbps | 6.3Gb
Audio: French AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English, French
01:37:00 | France | Comedy, Drama
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL | 4:3 | 720x576 | 9000 kbps | 6.3Gb
Audio: French AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English, French
01:37:00 | France | Comedy, Drama
Danielle Darrieux plays an impoverished reform-school escapee who finds a new lease on life when she enrolls in a school for pickpockets run by Fagin-like Saturnin-Fabre. Before long, Darrieux is the school's prize pupil, though she intends to abandon her life of crime should the right man come along. But Saturnin-Fabre has other ideas, and grooms Darrieux for her entree into High Society, the better to divest foreign ambassador Andre Luguet of his valuables…
Director: Henri Decoin
Cast: Danielle Darrieux, Claude Dauphin, Andre Luguet, Junie Astor, Charles Dechamps, Roger Blin, Sylvain Itkine, Pierre Feuillere, Jean Hebey, Julien Carette, Jean Tissier, Saturnin Fabre, Roland Armontel, Marguerite de Morlaye, Sophie Desmarets, Dora Doll, Joffre, Jacques Mavel, Marcelle Monthil, Genevieve Morel, Andre Nicolle, Robert Ozanne, Max Revol, Sylvain
Battement de coeur / Beating Heart (1940)
Battement de coeur / Beating Heart (1940)
IMDb
Some six years after this early wartime release Sam Wood remade it with Ginger Rogers and succeeded in snatching a suet pudding from the jaws of a souffle. There's nothing terribly new or innovative in the Cinderella story and this Henri Decoin-Danielle Darrieux husband-and-wife entry came hot on the heels of the great Billy Wilder script 'Midnight' in which the penniless Claudette Colbert was taken under the wing of John Barrymore and introduced into Society. This time around Danielle Darrieux, who hasn't got change of a match when we see her first, enrols in Saturnin Fabre's Fagin-style school for thieves which leads directly to a meeting with an Ambassador which in turn leads to Society where Claude Dauphin is waiting to fall in love with the charming waif turned thief. It's all pure fluff, of course, but it's also all in the wrists and, it has to be said, French wrists have more style than those at Sunset and Vine. Basil Rathbone was a considerable actor in anyone's book in addition to being the finest swordsman - in the original meaning of the word - in Hollywood but compared to Saturnin Fabre he finishes a bad nowhere. It's highly unlikely that this gem will be screened outside a Festival of Classic French Films so the best that most buffs can do is lobby their local Art House. 8/10
~ writers_reign
Battement de coeur / Beating Heart (1940)
Battement de coeur / Beating Heart (1940)
