The Last Metro (1980)

The story of this film centers around a theater in Paris during the Second World War. Due the occupation by the Nazis, the Jewish owner of this theater (Lucas- played by Heinz Bennet) has signed it away to his wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve) and supposedly has fled to South America. Thats what everybody else besides his wife believes however since he's still hiding in the basement of the theater. She brings him food and keeps him company while she can but her main attention is on a new play that the theater is producing and is a decisive one since the survival of the theater depends on it. She plays the lead actress in this play and opposite her is an actor played by Gerard Depardieu. Listening in on the rehearsals, Lucas through Marion gives tips and is a kind of a second director of the play.

Though I wouldn't call myself an expert on the subject, I think this film does an excellent job of portraying the wartime atmosphere of German occupied lands in WWII. A character I found most intriguing was a theater critic by the name of Daxiat (Jean-Louis Richard). Publicly he denounces Jews and says that each and every one of them must be hunted down. Deep down inside of him, a side which he reveals to Marion, he still has a lot of respect Lucas. People are living under constant fear of the Nazis, especially Marion due to her hiding her husband in her basement.

Overall a pretty good film. If you enjoy good acting and WWII era films then this is for you.

Fmovies: Set in occupied Paris, 1980's "The Last Metro" is about a theater trying to survive in wartime Paris. Lucas Steiner, the German manager and director of the theater, is said to have fled Paris and left his beautiful movie star wife (Deneuve) to run the place in his absence. What no one knows is that Steiner never left - he's hiding in the basement of the theater until Marion can arrange a safe passage for him to the free zone.

Marion is unable to hire Jews in her theater and unbeknownst to her hires a very political man, Bernard Granger (Depardieu) as her leading man. The two fall for one another, but Marion doesn't act on her feelings because of her husband. Marion must put up with the anti-Semite critic Daxiat (Jean-Louis Richard), and when Bernard comes down on him for an insulting review, Marion is afraid the theater will be closed and washes her hands of him.

This is a film about people living in trying times and attempting to survive and do the work they love while danger lurks everywhere. The photography is beautiful, and the film is done with great style and captures the '40s atmosphere beautifully. Deneueve is breathtakingly beautiful, but all of the faces are so much more interesting than one finds in an American film. A captivating movie - I loved every minute of it.

The Last Metro (1980)

You can see this as a romance, a complicated one filled with restraint and false moves. You can see this as a war movie about resistance and suffering and subterfuge. Or you might see it as a slice of life--never mind the great plot elements--and get a feel for wartime Paris, its oppression under the Nazis and the inability to quite know what to do to survive.

This is layered with a play within a play in a couple ways, and if there is a weakness to the movie it's this inner play. Maybe it's meant to be a bit boring (as the Nazi-sympathizing critic says it is), but it takes up enough of the movie it drags the reality outside of the play down a bit.

Maybe the movie is about accommodation, about bending your highest principles to survive. Or maybe it's about how the smallest of romantic urges are okay to follow through on. Sometimes. Because in the end there is mostly a feeling of having survived. It isn't triumphant, quite, but relieved.

Francois Truffaut is of course not just a famous director but a lionized one, seeming to get credit for lifting cinema into something artistic and valuable, both. All of that is here. The best of this--like feeling leading actress Catherine Deneuve walking the tightrope through people she could not totally trust--is amazing. The filming is subtle and gorgeous, a warm and humanized camera in the hands of Nestor Almendros (famous in the U.S. for "Days of Heaven"). The writing is natural and spare, except for those parts in the interior plays. It is, at its best, a moving beautiful movie.

The structure has an odd breakdown at the end--intentional, with voice-over, but odd nonetheless. It's disruptive not only in time, as intended, but in tone. It forces the viewer to remember this is a fictional invention, an artifice with a cinematic point. And so it is. We see the end with detachment and it's not as rewarding as before.

There's no reason not to see this film. It's different enough to be engaging and yet familiar enough to not be offputting (as some earlier French New Wave directors seem to want). Memorable, at least for a while.

The Last Metro fmovies. It is a strange feeling to read that many critics do not consider "Le Dernier Métro" as one of Truffaut's best films.This is absurd as Monsieur Truffaut was a cinéaste who considered all his films as equal.One is not sure as to how some harsh critics have considered this film as one of Truffaut's commercial projects.The truth of the matter is that Truffaut had always wanted to make a film about Nazism as he had experienced this vicious phenomenon as a young boy.It must be made clear that Truffaut did not make "Le Dernier Métro" in order to please critics,well wishers and admirers.As we talk of this film,it must be stated that "Le Dernier Metro" is an equivocal title for a Truffaut film.It is a title which denotes danger,uncertainty and utter chaos.This is because if one misses the last metro train there would be nothing but unpredictable hopelessness.For denizens of Paris during Nazi occupation time there were good chances that the last metro could be missed by many people who stayed out late nights for theatrical performances.Although this is a film about an artistic "ménage à trois",Le Dernier Métro deals with hidden sexualities of its different characters. It also talks of a restrained love affair which is dwarfed due to two lovers' arrogance. German occupation of Paris is shown in a light tone as there are no scenes of atrocities perpetrated by German soldiers. In this film we get an idea of how artists (cinema and theater) behave in a given set up.It also depicts cold critics who are able of destroy not only somebody's career but also an entire theater production house.Among the actors Andréa Ferréol is at her sensual best.Jean Poiret looks sleek too. The best thing about this film is German actor Heinz Bennent's performance as Lucas Steiner,a theater director who is fed up of his isolation.His character is similar to that of Marnie,a role played by Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock's film "Marnie".

An almost banal story about normal people which by its naturalness attains a truly remarkable human greatness. Against the background of nazi occupation of Paris with its whole train of treasons, pusillanimities, courage, resistance, collusions and collaboration with the enemy, indignities and oppression, a theatrical company staged underground by its director who is secretly hidden because he's Jewish, puts on the stage a play about love also repressed, a play however which resounds as a freedom although smothered shout in the darkness enveloping France and Europe by then. The acting performance of Depardieu and Deneuve is brilliant as usual although very simple and natural. Besides that, Deneuve is indeed one of the most beautiful movie stars we have ever seen. This movie is also a hymn to the theatre as free expression since ancient Greece, living through the love of those who devote themselves to it, very often with abnegation and in adverse conditions. It must by all means be seen because, in spite of all, it makes us believe in human virtues which keep pace here with the theatrical actors' talent.

One often sees the criticism of Francois Truffaut"s "Le Dernier Metro" ( "The Last Metro") that he had turned to making films in the tradition of the films that he had scorned as a young critic in the 1950s. Of course, most of these writers are not familiar with the films that he had scorned. I would say "yes" he was working in a tradition. He could almosthave titles the film "Si Paris occupeé nous était conté". Sacha Guitrywas one of his heroes. But he did call the film "Le Dernier Metro" and that title points to the tradition of the film and explains its style.It is true that the early scene where Bernard tries to pick up Arlette bears some resemblance to the scene at the beginning of "Les Enfants des Paradis" in which Frederick attempts to pick up Garance. It must be remembered though that the young critics of the 50s had no ax to grind with the Prevert-Carne films of the late 30s and the first half of the 40s. Anyone who watches the clip of Godard from 1963 on the "Bande a Part" will hear him praise the Carne of "Quai des Brumes" before deprecating the Carne of "Les Tricheurs". Even their criticism of Carne that merely photograph his screenwriters scenario, that he was more a "metteur en image" than a "metteur en scene", had started in the mid-40s by Henri Jeanson, Carne's one-time collaborator. But getting back to my point that scene occurring in the midst of the crowd on the Boulevard des Crime in the Carne film explains its title and theme.Carne's film is about theater-goers, even his four theatricalprotagonists all attend plays. Truffaut's film though is not so muchabout the audience as it is about the theater world and hence its title" Le Dernier Metro". Before I get back to my point I believe I should note here that "Le Dernier Metro" was meant to be one panel in a trilogy on the entertainment world. "La Nuit Americaine" ("Day for Night") was of course the film panel. And "L'Agence Magique" a film about Music Hall was never made. In the late 70s Truffaut had a screenplay for this film ready to shoot and had begun pre-production but the failure of "The Green Room" caused him to alter his plans and to film "L'Amour en Fuite".

The voice-over prologue describes an occupied Paris where night workers have to scurry to make the last metro in order to beat the curfew. What is left to our imaginations is to realize that many of these workers are theater people. Jean Marais whose real-life thrashing of the Je Suis Partout drama critic Alain Laubreaux provided the inspiration for one of the key scenes in the film described the last metro thusly in his autobiography "Histoires de ma Vie" (page 159)

"The last metro was marvelous. As packed as the others. It carried all of the theater world of Paris. Everyone knew everyone else. We spoke of the latest concert, of the ballet, of the theater. Outside, it was the blackout, the militias, German patrols, hostages if one was out past curfew." NOTE: "Tout-Paris" usually means " Paris high society" but Marais in the book frequently uses in a narrower sense of "the theater world".

In other words "Les Films de Carosse" had produced a film that represented "the last metro" as the golden coach of occupied Paris. Some quarter of a century earlier before Truffaut made "Le Dernier Metro" he w