Cliomuse.com
Where history and movies meet
Cliomuse.com
  • Featured Movies
    • 12 Years a Slave (2013)
    • 1941 (Spielberg) >
      • 1941: Part 2
    • Affair of the Necklace
    • Alice's Restaurant: best of the American counterculture movies?
    • Army of Crime
    • Army of Shadows
    • The Artist >
      • 'The Artist':2
    • Anthropoid: the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, 1942: Four Very Different Movies >
      • Hangmen Also Die: Hollywood meets emigres from Nazi Germany
    • Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
    • Battle of the Rails ( La bataille du rail)
    • Belle (2014)
    • Bhowani Junction
    • Blackboard Jungle >
      • Blackboard Jungle Pt.2
    • Carry On Up the Khyber
    • Charlie Wilson's War
    • The City Across the River
    • The Counterculture : best movies about the American counterculture era
    • Custer - two contrasting movie portrayals: "They Died With Their Boots On" and "Little Big Man" >
      • They Died With Their Boots On
      • Stalin and the Movies >
        • Stalin, Disney, Eisenstein, & Ivan the Terrible
      • Death of Stalin
      • Little Big Man (1970)
    • Dark Knight Rises >
      • Dark Knight Rises Pt.2
    • The Deceivers
    • Diplomacy / Diplomatie (2014) movie
    • Dunkirk: Christopher Nolan's epic movie
    • El Cid
    • The Enigma Machine : four movies about the Enigma machine
    • Generation War >
      • Generation War: Jazz and the Swing Kids
      • Generation War: German women and the war
    • The Great Gatsby On the Big Screen
    • Gunga Din
    • A Hard Day's Night: Influences on the Movie
    • Hemingway & Gellhorn >
      • Martha Gellhorn >
        • Women war correspondents
    • Hyde Park on Hudson
    • The Imitation Game (2014) >
      • The Imitation Game Part 2: the truth about Turing and the Bletchley 'Bombe'. >
        • The Imitation Game: Turing, Bletchley and the Colossus >
          • Imitation Game: Turing, Bletchley Park and the Soviet spy
    • The Inner Circle (1991)
    • Is Paris Burning? >
      • Is Paris Burning? General von Choltitz
    • KIng of the Khyber Rifles
    • Kim
    • Léon Morin, Priest
    • Les Miserables (2012) >
      • Les Miserables in Movies: Fantine the grisette >
        • Les Miserables 3: guide to some historical references
    • "Les Misérables": Claude Lelouch updates a classic
    • Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)
    • The Long Duel
    • Looking at Lincoln - Spielberg's "Lincoln" & its predecessors and influences >
      • Spielberg's Lincoln
      • Abraham Lincoln: D.W. Griffith's version
      • Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
      • Abe Lincoln in Illinois
    • Mandingo (1975) Dir: Richard Fleischer
    • The Man Who Would Be King
    • Marie Antoinette (2006)
    • Marie-Antoinette / Shadow of the Guillotine
    • Farewell, My Queen
    • Marie Antoinette (1938) >
      • Marie Antoinette (1938) Pt.2
    • Mayerling
    • Midnight in Paris >
      • Midnight in Paris:2 >
        • Midnight in Paris:3
    • The Monuments Men (2014) Dir: George Clooney
    • North West Frontier / Flame Over India
    • La Nuit de Varennes - a post-modern take on a key episode in the French Revolution
    • Le Pere Tranquille (The Quiet Father) 1946
    • Peterloo: MIke Leigh's New Movie >
      • Peterloo2
    • Pompeii in the movies >
      • Pompeii (2014) Paul W.S. Anderson director
    • Rebel Without a Cause
    • Ridicule
    • Scott Fitzgerald Goes to Hollywood
    • Sergeant Rutledge
    • Silence of the Sea
    • Swing Kids (1993)
    • The Train
    • Train to Pakistan
    • Stranglers of Bombay
    • Tonka
    • Tulip Fever
    • Viceroy's House
    • The Vikings
    • Vietnam Westerns: western movies and the Vietnam war
    • Wee Willie Winkie
    • The Wind and the Lion
    • Woman in Gold >
      • Woman in Gold Pt.2: the Vienna Scene in early 20th Century Vienna
    • Un village française: French TV series
    • Waterloo: the movie about Napoleon's final battle
    • Zabriskie Point
  • Places
    • Settings: the North West Frontier
    • Movies Set in the North-West Frontier >
      • Thuggees
    • Movies Set in Paris and Versailles
  • Events
    • Events That Inspired Movies 2
    • French Resistance and Collaboration in World War II: Selected Movies
  • People
    • People Part 2
  • Music
    • Rock Around the Clock
    • Don't Knock the Rock
    • The Girl Can't Help It >
      • Pt2:The Girl Can't Help It
  • Free State of Jones
  • Great Wall (2017)
  • Rogue One & World War 2
  • Hollywood and anti-Americanism in a small country: Amercan movies & their critics in New Zealand 1916 - 1956
    • New Zealanders' Love of Movies 1900s-1956
    • Campaign against Hollywood movies in New Zealand
    • Campaign against HollywoodPt 2
  • Hollywood versus Pinewood Pt2
  • New Zealanders and Movies: the Enigmatic Gordon Mirams: film critic, film censor and public intellectual
  • Aryan Papers: Stanley Kubrick's Proposed Movie

Marie Antoinette / Shadow of the Guillotine (1956)
Dir: Jean Delannoy

Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
As the variety of titles and posters indicates, director Jean Delannoy's 1956 movie was intended for an international audience. One version was made in French, the other in  English. This movie is now little-known, partly because of the confusing variety of titles. Its main emphasis is on the Queen's alleged affair with Swedish aristocrat Axel von Fersen, and also the latter part of the Queen's life, including the flight to Varennes,  and consequent imprisonment and execution.For movie buffs, the film is also of interest because its director was famously the target of vicious criticism by the New Wave directors emerging in the 1950s.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Michele Morgan's Marie Antoinette is a litle lacking in warmth, but she conveys an aura of royal elegance and style.

What's it all about?

Picture
This mid-1950s movie goes under several titles, although released in the UK as Shadow of the Guillotine. This is because it is an example of an important postwar trend in the cinema world: the internationalization of movie production.For financial / taxation reasons, as well as convenience of production, movies were increasingly the product of multi-national deals, using actors, writers,directors, studios and locations from several countries. Many of these movies were spectaculars, taking advantage of the variety of great locations and a cheap supply of extras in low-wage countries. Marie-Antoinette /  Shadow of the Guillotine offered a recognisable and fascinating personality, a famous series of events and the backdrop of Versailles. But such productions were condemned by both traditionalists and the New Wave for what they regarded as their extravagance and lack of specific national identity and generic subject-matter. All of these features, both schools maintained, came at the expense of film-making that focused on social, political and personal issues.
Marie-Antoinette certainly offered the widest possible scope. It crammed in as much as possible about Marie and Versailles, although it emphasised the Queen's affair with the Swedish diplomat/playboy Count Alex von Fersen (Richard Todd). In this movie Louis XVI is played as a foolish man out of his depth, easily manipulated. The Queen is presented as imperious, glamorous, rather cold and calculating, well aware of her ability to manipulate men. Her trial and execution present her in a more sympathetic light: dignified and courageous. Although Morgan, like Norma Shearer in the 1938 Hollywood Marie Antoinette, is not particularly convincing as the young Queen, she provides an interesting interpretation of the more mature woman: aware of her beauty and power, rather coolly delighting in her ability to connive and manipulate, gathering her dignity as the e
Sofia Coppola's 2006 movie follows its half-century older predecessor with its emphasis on the glamour and conspicuous consumption of the Versailles court. Her movie also follows the 1956 version in that it spends some time on the relationship between Fersen and the Queen, although Coppola's is considerably more explicit but rather less convincing, despite Todd's wooden performance as Fersen.


Picture
Richard Todd as a rather wooden von Fersen.
Picture
The royal family -or three of them - in Duhommel's movie.
Picture
King and Queen as the net draws in.
Picture
Coppola's view of the Fersen affair is rather over-heated.
Picture
Portrait of Count Axel von Fersen.
Coppola's 2006 Marie Antoinette follows the 1956 movie in paying considerable attention to the Queen's affair with Count Alex von Versen. However, the 1956 movie is more realistic if less explicit, treating the affair almost as a court ritual and a study in mutual calculation. Delannoy''s movie also pays more attention to the royal children; it treats the King as a rather slow-witted and hidebound monarch, an error not made by Coppola.

The director: Jean Delannoy - target of the New Wave

Picture
Marie-Antoinette's director (who died in 2008, aged 100) was a controversial figure in French cinematic circles when he made the movie in 1956. Delannoy had worked in the French film industry since the 1920s, first as an editor, and then moving on to direct in the 1930s. In the 1940s several of his movies were well received, including  Les Jeux Sont Faits -which had a screenplay by Sartre - and La Symphonie Pastorole (1946) which the Palmed'Or at Cannes. But in the early 1950s Delannoy came under sustained attack by a new generation of French movie-makers, especially Francois Truffaut whose famous article "A Certain Tendency" condemned the French commercial cinema and directors such as Delannoy who relied heavily on scripts and prided themselves on their careful, rather traditional, craftsmanship. Truffuat and Godard established the cult of the auteur, the director as presiding genius, relying on improvisation and breaking the rules of plot and structure, using unknowns for actors, while disdaining commercial considerations. For them film-making was a highly personal statement of personal and political opinion.  Dellanoy's studio-bound films, such as Marie-Antoinette and 1957's Hunchback of Notre Dame, expensive featuring stars like Michele Morgan and Anthony Quinn, and internationally financed, were the antithesis of what the new generation considered to be worthwhile cinema.

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.