Rue de L'estrapade

press release: France | 1953 | 35mm | 100 min. | French with English Subtitles

Director: Jacques Becker; Cast: Daniel Gélin, Louis Jourdan, Anne Vernon

Returning to work in France after becoming a star in Hollywood, Jourdan plays a race-car driver and unfaithful husband whose wife (Vernon) moves out and establishes residence on the title street. Becker’s “romantic comedy of decadence, frivolity, and cynicism seems imbued with the very high-gloss lacquer that it derides...Beneath its blithe humor, it is a bleak vision of mismatched lives and misguided mores” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker). Print courtesy of the Institut Français, Paris.

Jacques Becker: A Master Before the Wave

An enormously versatile director, Jacques Becker (1906–1960) distinguished himself in the French film industry with a series of box office successes that saw him oscillating between period melodramas, working-class romances, nail-biting studies in suspense, and even an absorbing biopic of a great artist. Becker, in a career that was cut short by his untimely death at age 53, counted Francois Truffaut, Jean Renoir and Jean-Pierre Melville among his admirers. This series provides a healthy sampling of Becker’s strong body of work, including all three features (Antoine et Antoinette, Rendezvous in July, Edouard et Caroline) that comprise his “Youth Trilogy.” Special Thanks to Rialto Pictures and Amélie Garin-Davet and Laurence Geannopulos of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

All Cinematheque screenings are free and open to the public.