It's difficult to believe that the Robert Enrico who made Les Aventuriers also made Au Couer de la vie a decade previously because the two are chalk and cheese having only directorial talent in common. A cynic may remark that Enrico had been frightened by Max Ophuls after noting the way his camera is seldom if ever static, circling the action constantly, creeping through the woods like a Comanche war party surrounding settlers but fluid camera-work is only one of the stylistic strings on Enrico's bow. He has taken three stories by Ambrose Bierce all illuminating some aspect of The War Between The States (1861-64), often erroneously labelled the American Civil War, and melded them into a powerful - all the more so because it is largely silent - anti-War statement. All three stories blur the boundaries between reality and the supernatural and the first segment 'Mockingbird' is the ideal introduction to the concept when a soldier, rewarded for bravery with a furlough, falls asleep and dreams of a Past that is still in the Future and all too soon becomes the Present. The second segment 'Chickamauga' is a tour de force in which the actual battle is unseen but 'felt' by a deaf-mute child who subsequently plays among the dead victims and induces them to rise and follow his reverse Pied Piper in a danse macabre. The last segment 'An Incident At Owl Creek Bridge' was widely shown in the 1960s as a 'short' and is arguably the most lyrical of the three; a condemned man is hanged from the eponymous bridge and dropped into the river where, miraculously, he is able to free himself and out-swim the bullets of the hanging detail. Joyously he runs all the way home to the arms of his waiting wife but then ...
This is yet another neglected masterpiece that separates the men of Real French Cinema from the boys of the new wavelet which, by 1963, was barely a trickle and as dbmonteuil has said in his own perceptive review another one or two films of this quality around 1958-61 and the nouvelle vague wouldn't even have been a joke.
This is yet another neglected masterpiece that separates the men of Real French Cinema from the boys of the new wavelet which, by 1963, was barely a trickle and as dbmonteuil has said in his own perceptive review another one or two films of this quality around 1958-61 and the nouvelle vague wouldn't even have been a joke.