Search - Grandes Manoeuvres on DVD

Content Advisory: Questionable for Children Movie Release: 1955 Format: DVD SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Studio: C'est La Vie DVD Members Wishing: 3 Genres: Drama, Romance, Romantic Drama, Period Film

Rene Clair's Grand Maneuver was originally titled Les Grandes Manoeuvres, which should surprise no one. Gerard Phillipe plays a dashing dragoons officer, vintage 1913, who wagers his friends that he can make the next woman who enters the room fall in love with him. In strides drop-dead gorgeous Michele Morgan, and the rest writes itself. Phillipe plans a slow seduction and a quick goodbye; Morgan, need we say, is no "goodbye girl." For all its lavish sets and meticulously detailed period costumers, Grand Maneuver is at base the old American farce Sailor Beware with a French accent. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Michèle Morgan - Marie Louise Riviera
Gérard Philipe - Lt. Armand de la Verne
Jean Desailly - Victor Duverger
Brigitte Bardot - Lucie
Yves Robert - Felix Leroy
Simone Valere - Gisele

René Clair's Les Grandes Manoeuvres (1955) comes to DVD in a Region 2 release from C'est La Vie DVD, in its original French (with English subtitles and annotation) and in a gorgeous edition. The color has all of its full richness and luster, and the detail is extraordinary, right down to the texture in the fabric of the officers' uniforms. A kind of operetta without music or singing, the movie is a compellingly delightful self-contained fantasy set amid the upper classes and military classes of France, eerily enough on the eve of the First World War -- the last time that anyone could take seriously the world of officers, gentlemen, and ladies of the nobility -- and it tells of a young officer's desperate pursuit of a romance with a gorgeous divorcée (Michèle Morgan). Even Clair's exteriors have a look of startling artificiality about them, and they work together with the elegant settings and costumes in which this story takes place; at one point, he even has fun with the idea of the camera lens as an onlooker watches his beloved through a rolled-up program. The whole movie is a feast for the eyes, and the subtitles have been designed and enhanced to make them easily readable on even over the lightest toned of backgrounds. The bonus materials include a 30-minute documentary on Brigitte Bardot (who appears in this movie in a supporting role) that is part of a series called Hollywood Remembers, which follows her through the start of her modeling career at 15 through her early movies (represented by shots from trailers) to ...And God Created Woman and into the 1990s. There are trailers for two other Bardot movies and a seldom-seen Clair short (set to music by Erik Satie); a set of biographies of the principal cast members and the director; and an alternate, more tragic, ending to the film that was shot but abandoned by the director. The 106-minute movie has been mastered in full-screen (1.33:1), and has been given a reasonable 17 chapters; the sound is mastered at a healthy volume, and is nearly as bright as the color. The disc opens automatically to a multi-layer menu in English, with the subtitle control easily accessible. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide