1950s French Movies

For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.

Orphaned after a Nazi air raid, Paulette, a young Parisian girl, runs into Michel, an older peasant boy, and the two quickly become close. Together, they try to make sense of the chaotic and crumbling world around them, attempting to cope with death as they create a burial ground for Paulette's deceased pet dog. Eventually, however, Paulette's stay with Michel's family is threatened by the harsh realities of wartime.

Charles Walter, a forestry contractor, has helped Noël Portal to start a new life. When Victor, the new foreman and Charles'wife's lover, is found murdered, everything points to the guilt of the deceived husband. To save his benefactor, Noël decides to accuse himself of the the crime. He is condemned to death.

A short mime adaptation of a Thomas Mann story about a Parisian urchin who makes her living selling human heads.

Michel takes up pickpocketing on a lark and is arrested soon after. His mother dies shortly after his release, and despite the objections of his only friend, Jacques, and his mother's neighbor Jeanne, Michel teams up with a couple of petty thieves in order to improve his craft. With a police inspector keeping an eye on him, Michel also tries to get a straight job, but the temptation to steal is hard to resist.

Recently released from reform school, Élisa works at Madame Irma's before moving to Paris, where her success is growing. On a trip to the provinces, she meets Bernard, a blind man. They soon fall in love, but Élisa hides her activities from him. When he finds out, he hits her. The situation quickly degenerates.

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

Rose Chaperon is asked by her confectioner mother Mathilde to bring jewels to her sick grandmother, Madame de Mergrand. But Hugues, the latter's brother, is prepared to do anything to get his hands on the loot. To this end he hires a villainous young man, Jean-Louis nicknamed Loup, to do the job. Will Loup engulf and devour Little "Rose "Riding Hood?

In a run-down South American town, four men are paid to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin into the jungle through to the oil field. Friendships are tested and rivalries develop as they embark upon the perilous journey.

Yes, Doudou (or, more respectfully, Edouard Doucin) is both heir to a big sugar refinery and its managing director but he is also an incorrigibly bashful bachelor, which just exasperates his aunt Agatha. Summoned to marry as soon as possible, Doudou is fortunate enough to meet Babette , an elegant young lady who wishes to introduce him to her parents. When he comes to visit them, he mistakes the floor out of nervousness. In fact,he finds himself at the Lautiers' not the Olivaros'. Now, chance has it that this couple of shopkeepers also have a marriageable daughter. And as Poupette is romantic, passionate and adorable, Doudou can't find the nerve to disappoint her. As a result the young man gets engaged...twice ! How the devil will he cope ?

A famous poet in postwar Paris, scorned by the Left Bank youth, is in love with both his wife Eurydice and a mysterious princess. Seeking inspiration, the poet becomes obsessed and follows the princess from the world of the living to the land of the dead.

Arlette thinks she has made a wonderful gift to her daughter Sylvie, who has just married François Morel, a young journalist. And, to tell the truth, not everybody receives a posh little bar like the Royal Montmartre as a gift. The trouble is that Monsieur Jo, the former owner of the joint is also the boss of a gang of drug traffickers. And that he has managed to persuade the pair of naive lovebirds to drop a painting to a friend on their way to their honeymoon place. Now the picture is stuffed with drugs! The honeymoon trip promises to be eventful...

The Remi abandoned by his foster father sold to the troubadour Vasalis, in his living through the rural villages the people to entertain, gehoplen his three dogs and a monkey. In the beginning Remi takes its new master, but a demanding and hard man, and the animals have not been too much with the clumsy boy. But gradually creates a bond between Remi and his new comrades, until their friendship is suddenly disrupted when Vasalis is arrested for vagrancy and sentenced. Then Remi, alone in the world, along with his animal friends in position to try to keep ...

The film follows the life of Napoleon from his early life in Corsica to his death at Saint Helena. The film is notable for its use of location shooting for numerous scenes, especially at the French estates of Malmaison and Fontainebleau, the Palace of Versailles, and sites of Napoleonic battles including Austerlitz and Waterloo.

The deep conversation between a Japanese architect and a French actress forms the basis of this celebrated French film, considered one of the vanguard productions of the French New Wave. Set in Hiroshima after the end of World War II, the couple -- lovers turned friends -- recount, over many hours, previous romances and life experiences. The two intertwine their stories about the past with pondering the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city.

La Garçonne is a 1957 French film directed by Jacqueline Audry. It follows Monique, an ingenue and a clueless girl who believes in true love. When she discovers her future husband has a lover, she rebels against her bourgeois life:s he will lead a free and wild life and she will live like a man. Soon she becomes the toast of Gay Paris, sleeping with all the men around, and even with a woman.

Augustin Robustal and his wife Lilane run the riverside café "Au joyeux gardon" and if the "gardon" (roach) is happy, the owners of the establishment are not as business is bad. Indeed the place is almost deserted except by four faithful patrons, Francis, a garage owner, Pivois, a man with a modest private income, Loulou, a radio technician and Boudoux, an undertaker. Now, the Robustals employ a fanciful but gifted waiter, Hippolyte. This one happens to be infatuated with Liliane, so much so that one day he takes out a life insurance in her favor. The four regulars' reaction is instant: they offer Robustal to execute Hippolyte, in exchange for a commission. But the trouble (at least for them!) is that Hippolyte is indestructible.

Life in a small Mexican village where joy and misery, hope and pain, passion and guilt, love and decay, life and death are mixed in the peasants life and two French citizens who end up stranded in there, during a typhoid epidemic.

Noguère, an old patriarch, is about to die and decides to confess at last to a priest. He once lived alone with his son Juste, who helped him to farm the Mauvents land. One night Noguère fired at a couple of trespassers, hurting the girl and killing her fiancé. Giving Catoune, the girl, the shelter of his home, Noguère was forced - however reluctantly it may have been - to break the bad news to the fiancée. For all that Catoune recovered, settled down and later married Juste. After a while Juste left for the war and was soon reported missing. Noguère comforted the distressed young woman so well that she became her mistress. But Juste had not been killed.

In November of 1942, the French submarine, the "Casabianca,", escapes from German-held Toulon, and, upon joining the Free French forces at Algiers, is sent on a secret mission to Corsica to take two secret-service agents to make contact with the underground there. The agents contact the Marquis resistance forces, and learn they are ready to revolt but lack the needed arms and ammunition. The submarine is sent back to Corscia with the necessary weapons for the resistance-fighters, and also returns with trained troops to assist the resistance forces in attacking the Germans.

In a small French village, everything would be quiet if the local wildlife cop was not being ridiculed by a smart poacher.

Jules Pinson, photographer in a small provincial village is in love with Annette, the daughter of the grocer. She 's dreaming only heros of adventure movies, so Jules invents a twin brother, Caesar, hunter of lions in Senegal ...

A merchant, without audacity with women, is dragged by a friend into the worst marital complications. His setbacks will ultimately pay him off.

A self-assured businessman murders his employer, husband of his mistress, which unintentionally provokes an ill-fated chain of events.

Maurice Vallier, nicknamed "Ma Pomme"(which means "myself" in slang), is a cheerful man, well aware that money does not make happiness and who, of all things, prices freedom. Which is why he has become a tramp and he has never regretted his choice of life. Things go smoothly until the day he inherits a huge amount of money. He first refuses it but changes his mind when he realizes that thanks to the inheritance he can help others. Even more enticing is the fact that he must share the big money with a charming air hostess. However once he deems he has done enough good he gives up the money left and resumes his old lifestyle singing along "Ma pomme c'est moi, j'suis plus heureux qu'un roi..."

In spite of his failures as a peddler, Casimir guaranteed his fiance that this time the vacuum cleaners will work for good. But he's still unsuccessful until he go to the appartment of Paul-Andre, a painter who was engaged by correspondence to a rich south-American woman. That's exactly when she arrive armed with a gun infuriated after she had received a rupture letter from the man she had never seen. She mistakenly took Casimir as her painter lover. Casimir his ready to flee until he learned she owned many hotels, a thousand rooms in fact. "A thousand rooms, a thousand vacuum cleaners", he suddenly think.

A crime is committed in a circus during the performance of a sketch between two clowns. One of them is killed. They accuse the other, Sylvia's fiancé, to whom the victim was courting. After many twists and turns, the murderer is discovered to be the troupe's dwarf.

Lola Montes, previously a great adventuress, is reduced to being the attraction of a circus after having been the lover of various important men.

A foreign pianist who comes to visit Paris is ripped off by a young man and his sister. But he soon falls in love with this one.

A group of ex-resistance fighters are brought together by Marie-Octobre, the code name of Marie-Helene Dumoulin. The former members of the network have carried on with their lives after the war, but this evening they are going to have to live again a fateful night – the night their leader was killed. He had been betrayed, his name given to the Germans. The search for the traitor puts each personality in the spotlight – and also that of the killed leader, Castille.

At the Belgian border, a group of young people engaged in various contraband traffic bother the customs officers.

A husband plans to shoot the man having an affair with his wife, but both come to realise their desire to escape the tyrannical woman in their lives.

Pierre Laurent, a former doctor, has established himself as a renowned healer in Brittany. A young girl, Isabelle, who follows his results with admiration, declares her love for him and becomes engaged. The reactions of his former colleagues bring Pierre before the courts. A misunderstanding with Isabelle thwarts the wedding plans. Later, the young girl, suffering from a brain tumor, allows herself to be cured by the healer. Pierre does not cure her, but leads her to her death without suffering.

The cruel and abusive headmaster of a boarding school, Michel Delassalle, is murdered by an unlikely duo -- his meek wife and the mistress he brazenly flaunts. The women become increasingly unhinged by a series of odd occurrences after Delassalle's corpse mysteriously disappears.

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In 1866, a young Muscovite named Alexei Ivanovitch arrives in Baden Baden, then the gambling capital of Austria, and is soon engaged by General Zagorianski to look after his children. Alexei discovers that his employer is a compulsive gambler who has been almost ruined by his addiction. The only money the General has is provided by the Marquis de Grieux, an adventurer who intends to marry Zagorianski’s sister, Pauline. In doing so, de Grieux hopes to profit from the vast inheritance that will come the General’s way from his Aunt Antonina, who is presently very ill. Alexei is appalled by this society which lives only for money. He loves Pauline and wants to take her to a healthier place, but when she refuses to marry him, he begins to gamble at the casino…

Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s endearing clown, takes a holiday at a seaside resort, where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another. Tati’s masterpiece of gentle slapstick is a series of effortlessly well-choreographed sight gags involving dogs, boats, and firecrackers; it was the first entry in the Hulot series and the film that launched its maker to international stardom.

RY A revolution breaks out in a South American country while its cruel dictator is on a trip to France. The rebels have made careful plans to blow up the dictator's private plane as he returns, but at the last second he changes plans and travels on a commercial flight. The rebels then must make a difficult decision: they must either blow up a flight filled with innocent passengers, or else allow the dictator to return home and take brutal reprisals against the leaders of the uprising.

An ex-prisoner tries to get his young son back on the straight and narrow.

Rosario was unjustly condemned for a robbery committed in the theater where she worked as secretary of producer Gaston Leducq. When she leaves prison, she tries to prove her innocence to Gaston, but things do not happen as she expected.