1929 was the end of silent cinema in France, the process of conversion beginning in earnest for the following year's releases. So what height of expressiveness had the French movies reached?
Quite a bit, if Henri Fescourt's epic three-and-a-half-hour-and-change adaptation of Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo is anything to go by. The novel is a cracking yarn, a bit of a warhorse perhaps but always reliable and dramatic, full of crimes, revenges, outrageous coincidences and spectacular reversals in the best nineteenth-century tradition. One would expect a movie to be, at best, bold and operatic, at worst, staid and stagey. But Fescourt, who had already made a vast version of Les misérables (1925), manages to combine the best of commercial cinema's dramatics with the innovations of the impressionist filmmakers, to create something strikingly modern.
Stop me if you've heard this before: hero Edmond Dantès is maligned by a fellow sailor, snitched on by a romantic rival,...
Quite a bit, if Henri Fescourt's epic three-and-a-half-hour-and-change adaptation of Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo is anything to go by. The novel is a cracking yarn, a bit of a warhorse perhaps but always reliable and dramatic, full of crimes, revenges, outrageous coincidences and spectacular reversals in the best nineteenth-century tradition. One would expect a movie to be, at best, bold and operatic, at worst, staid and stagey. But Fescourt, who had already made a vast version of Les misérables (1925), manages to combine the best of commercial cinema's dramatics with the innovations of the impressionist filmmakers, to create something strikingly modern.
Stop me if you've heard this before: hero Edmond Dantès is maligned by a fellow sailor, snitched on by a romantic rival,...
- 12/18/2014
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
Guillermo del Toro has revealed that his dream project is a "Gothic-Western" remake of The Count Of Monte Cristo. Speaking to MTV News, the Hellboy director said that he hopes to one day helm a reinvention of Alexandre Dumas's classic novel. "It's a Gothic-Western retelling of The Count Of Monte Cristo, and I co-wrote it with Kitt Carson and Matthew Robbins around 1993 to 1998," he said of the script, thought to be titled The Left Hand of Darkness. (more)...
- 2/25/2009
- by By Simon Reynolds
- Digital Spy
One of my personal all-time favorite movies is Kevin Reynolds' The Count of Monte Cristo, the one from 2002, not the old black and white versions. Anyone who has seen it or read Alexandre Dumas' book knows why it's such an incredible story. I couldn't ever imagine anyone adapting it again, but if there's one person I might allow to do just that, it would be Guillermo del Toro. He already has enough projects on his plate to last him a lifetime, but in a recent chat with MTV, del Toro talked about one of his dreams, which was adapting The Count of Monte Cristo again as a "gothic-western" titled The Left Hand of Darkness. "It's a gothic-western retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, and I co-wrote it with [Kitt Carson] and Matthew Robbins around 1993 to 1998. I wrote a lot of that during the kidnapping of my father, ...
- 2/25/2009
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
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