LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Jacques Feyder
built 221 days ago
Underneath everything Jacques Feyder did was a great love and mastery of his medium that gave integrity and style to his work. As a young man he rejected the bourgeois background of his Belgian home and became an actor. He fell in love with the talented Françoise Rosay, who became his partner for life. He acted in the cinema of Victorin Jasset, Feuillade, and Léon Gaumont, then became a scriptwriter, and finally began directing.
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Jacques Feyder's The Kiss (1928) is a little drama that mixes every sort of genre - romance, soap opera, thriller. It recalls Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915), in that its central character is a society woman who gets mixed up in a scandalous trial.
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Although this was French filmmaker Jacques Feyder's first truly important film, you wouldn't guess it by reading the trade papers of the day. Because of the storyline -- a fantasy tale adapted from the novel by Pierre Benoit -it was considered a novelty. In addition, Film Daily went out of its way to remark on the unattractiveness of star Stacia Napierkowska -- her zaftig figure was too hefty for American tastes. The film opens with a discussion between two French officers about the disappearance of Captain Morhange (Jean Angelo). It is suspected that Lieutenant Saint-Avit (Georges Melchior) knows more than he has let on, and finally he tells what happened. While traveling through the desert, Saint-Avit and Morhange were lured to the submerged Atlantis.
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Though filmed once before as a 1927 silent film by Carné's mentor Jacques Feyder, Émile Zola's novel Thérèse Raquin received a wholly original re-working when director Marcel Carné (Port of Shadows) adapted it himself in 1953. Carné blended the theatricality of his revered Children of Paradise with the neo-realism of his trenchant pre- and post-war dramas into a film that bears more of a resemblance to James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Luchino Visconti's Ossessione than to the Zola of Nana and Germinal. Carné's "clinical injections of suspense" (New York Times) earned him the Silver Lion director's prize at the 1953 Venice Film Festival.
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Until now, Jacques Feyder has been unjustly reduced almost to a footnote in film history, but these beautifully-restored editions with stunning tints and new orchestral scores reveal him as one of the finest silent film directors in Europe. Following these accomplishments, Feyder was invited to Hollywood in 1929 to direct two outstanding films with Greta Garbo, The Kiss and the German version of Anna Christie, and to London for Marlene Dietrich in Knight without Armour; he is probably best remembered for Carnival in Flanders (La Kermesse heroique, 1935), which, unfortunately, was cut by about one-third for American release. Queen of Atlantis (L'Atlantide), based upon Pierre Benoit's best-selling exotic novel of the French foreign legion and the woman no man can resist, was filmed under gruelling conditions on location in the Sahara and in a large tent studio outside of Algiers. The desert, with its burning sun and vast expanse of sand, is the real star of this adventure, the most expensive French film until that time. It was hailed as a revelation, and ran for a year in Paris. Crainquebille is the name of a fruit and vegetable peddler (Maurice de Feraudy) who, accused of having insulted a policeman, becomes trapped in the bureaucratic web of French justice.
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One of the founders of the French cinema's genre of poetic realism, Jacques Feyder was born in 1885 Belgium and came from a long line of military men. His decision to enter show business was a source of great disgust for his father who forbid him to use the family name on the stage.
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Jacques Feyder