BroadcastChic
Excellent, a Must See
Reptileenbu
Did you people see the same film I saw?
lasttimeisaw
On paper, a middle-aged, faintly portly George Sanders doesn't seem to befit the image of Georges Duroy, aka. Bel Ami, the caddish protagonist of Maupassant's belle époque novel, and on the screen, he looks no better (meticulously arranged mustaches included), uppity, yes, but not dapper enough to cut the mustard as a congenital heart-breaker to his female admirers galore. However, this Hollywood adaptation, directed by a workmanlike Albert Lewin, resolves to downplay the sordidness in Bel Ami's social-climbing wiles and his misogynist contempt towards the weaker sex, his maneuver is self-seeking, for sure, but not without a proper gentility that is very characteristic of Parisian's silk-stocking upper crust, as if he intimates that it is those women's own fault of being uniformly bewitched by his natural appeal, as if he were merely a grudging condoner, and it always takes two to tango, whether it is Clotilde de Marelle (a 22-year-young Lansbury, already playing a widow with a tot under her belt), who pledges her subservient love to him at the expense of her own pride; or Claire Madeleine Forestier (Dvorak), the business-savvy wife of Georges' comrade-in-arms-turned-munificent-benefactor Charles Forestier (Carradine), voluntarily ties the knot with Bel Ami when she sees fit, business-wise; or Madame Walter (Emery), a modest-looking minted housewife, who foolishly takes their affair a bit too seriously, and her nubile daughter Suzanne (Douglas Rubes), gravitated to him like a witless moth to the unaccountable fire.Therefore, it is not strange that George's belated redemption is vamped up by a pall of Hollywood romantic soft touch (Darius Milhaud's majestic score is also here to help), and then almost immediately dissipated by the cockamamie dueling face-off, that excruciatingly camp struggle of his rival is a whopping embarrassment even by Hollywood's dated standard at that time, which, in hindsight, could be second-guessed as a deliberate move to diffuse the fatalistic heaviness in favor of a sanitized feeling of facile poetic justice. Yet, for all its foibles, Gordon Wiles' sumptuous production is a florid delight to sore eyes, and against the disadvantageous character arc, many of the distaff players manage to hold out their own stance, a slightly slouching Lansbury is excellently expressive apropos of her dramatic chops; Ann Dvorak takes pleasure and pride in rendering a beguiling ambiguity that manifest that she is not a victim but his equal in the aftermath, and Frances Dee, as Marie de Varenne, the sole rejector of Bel Ami's advances, makes her virtuous retort a welcome tonic to the picture's often disinterested pace and Sander's phlegmatic central performance. Another boost is Max Ernst's painting "Temptation of St. Antony", materializes itself for several seconds in its chromatic flair, the sole exception in this magnificently restored black-and-white eye-catcher, which, after all, belies its sensational tagline on its original title "the history of a scoundrel!", more a Punch-obsessed schemer who is ironically blind-sided by and eventually dies from the aristo-recognition he is spoiling for.
howardeisman
The movie is is faithful to the novel for about 3/4 of its running time. A handsome, amoral rake cuts his way through the vain, naive, foppish,self centered denizens of Parisian society in the 1880s He is not that smart, but he is shrewd enough to get the money and affection he craves. We don't know where his appetites came from. De Maupassant created him primarily to show the appalling psychological weaknesses of French upper class society "Prety Boy", as he is called, wins and wins big.Well, the morals code of 1947 would not permit this. A scoundrel thriving is as bad was a naked woman on screen in the 1940s. You couldn't show it! Thus, the entire last section of this movie is made to comply with the code, and it plays out a story of how "Pretty Boy"'s primary victim thwarts his schemes and gets even. She gets even Big.While I am happy to see the rat get his, this ending undermines the main point of the novel. It also doesn't fit the first three quarters. Characters suddenly behave differently than they did previously with no description of how and why they changed.Still, it is a literate and intelligent movie. Not many of this kind of movie was made then, and even fewer are made today It is well played. George Sanders is the perfect cad. All the female actors do very well. Even since I first saw Ann Dvorak when I was six or seven, I have had a crush on her all these many decades, so it was good to see her.Well worth the time for intelligent viewers...and those seniors who love Ann Dvorak!!
FilmFlaneur
Director Lewin started out on his own with a trio of literary adaptations: Somerset Maugham's Moon And Sixpence (1943) was followed by Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray (1945), and then came this version of Guy de Maupassant's best novel, Bel-Ami, in 1947. George Sanders appeared in all three, giving each a distinct flavour by his presence. A self-obsessed and destructive individual appears in all, increasingly prepared to isolate himself from conscience or morality in order to achieve his goals - at least until an ending brings some comeuppance or resolution. In the first, Sanders plays a Gauguinesque painter, who deserts his family to work in Tahiti. In the second, Dorian Gray pursues his famously immoral activities, Sanders in attendance, whilst Gray's famous painting grows ugly in the attic. In The Private Affairs Of Bel Ami (aka: Women Of Paris, 1947), Sanders returns to centre stage portraying a man climbing to social success over a succession of suffering women.Scriptwriter-director Lewin brought to each of these films characteristic qualities: literate dialogue, visual excellence, and a representation of interior states through colourful moments of art among them. In the fin de siècle worlds of Dorian Gray and Bel Ami, Lewin sharpens the unease and implicit questioning of mores shown in his earlier Maugham adaptation. Avoiding the temptations of melodrama, he chooses specific historical milieu by which to communicate the ennui of the privileged and the corrupt. Sanders is excellent as George Duroy, the title's charming and unscrupulous social climber, who cannot be trusted with hearts - or come to that, much else: one in the words of the title song who " will be leaving me, (and) who will be deceiving me.." First seen down to his last few francs in 1880's Paris, Duroy's suave looks continually make him irresistible to women have brought him little in the way of fortune. Offered a chance job in journalism by his ex-army friend Forestier (John Carradine), Duroy asks Forestier's independently minded wife Madeline to help with the creation of a first article, while also entering into a relationship with the far more doting Clotilde (Angela Lansbury). Soon the seductive antihero is on his way up the social scale after marrying Madeline (a suggestion he promptly broached in the hapless Forestier's death chamber). Later after engineering a scandal, he divorces this first wife, and acquires a defunct aristocratic title with a view to moving on and up again."You're a sneak thief... you take advantage of everyone, you deceive everyone," is the way the disillusioned Clotilde eventually personifies Duroy towards the end of the film, after he callously steals her heart, another man's wife and half her inheritance, then the family name of a missing heir, and finally inveigles the hand of a rich innocent. This single-minded obsession in reaching the top of the social ladder echoes that of the ambitious Horace Vendig in Ulmer's Ruthless, made the following year. Duroy's manipulative, seductive charm brings echoes too of Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, also from 1947. But while Duroy's progress does not directly lead to murder, it is more detestable and insidious. Whereas at the close of his film Verdoux offers disingenuous apology for his actions, Bel Ami (although saddled with a ending more in line with the demands of the censor than the original novel) is unrepentant, equating his final misfortunate as being "scratched... by an old cat." There are several elements that make Lewin's film interesting today, being the independent work of a minor, if idiosyncratic auteur, then relatively unusual. Even though the aspirational cad makes use of the women he gets to know, Madeline remains a strong and talented character in her own right. Besides helping Duroy with his writing at the very start, there is a strong suggestion that she has actually been doing much of her first husband's journalism for him too. And despite her final betrayal, she continues to impress as an individually motivated female, in contrast to the ever-loving and forgiving Clotilde. Both are victims but Duroy's emotional abuse and subjugation of them and others is a comment on his own coldness as well as on the liabilities of females in a prejudiced society, made especially keen by the knowledge each woman has of her own predicament. For men, the answer to honour slighted is a duel. Women at best are obliged to fall back on subterfuge or, at worst, live with the grief of a broken heart.Each of Lewin's first three films was made in black and white. But they also included moments when the screen bursts into startling colour, as the audience contemplates painting central to the theme. The Moon And Sixpence brings a final sequence showing the artist's work, a form of artistic justification for preceding events. In The Portrait Of Dorian Gray, the painting in question reflects back directly the moral dissolution of the subject. Bel Amis' canvas occupies a more complex position in its narrative than its predecessors. It's an expensive work of art, bought by a wealthy patron and admired by Duroy, - one of the few moments in which, half to himself, he evidently expresses an honesty with anything. Painted by Max Ernst (his Temptation Of St Anthony) it reflects back the decadence of its admirers, as well as continuing the plot's subtle thread of damnation.An excellent cast includes a young Lansbury as Duroy's one true love, and John Carradine as his tuberculosis-ridden journalist friend. Audiences today will be impressed by how modern the feel of it all is, whether in the depiction of Duroy's amoral, manipulative character, completely unfazed at being disliked, or the film's sophisticated and sympathetic treatment of women. Lewin's next work was the weirdly romantic Pandora And The Flying Dutchman (1951), his most ambitious film, the reception of which proved a disappointment. He never rose to such heights again. The Private Affairs Of Bel Ami, is less flamboyant perhaps but just as unforgettable, remaining his most satisfying work.
marco-gpe
Guy de Maupassant was a novelist who wrote a novel about a man, a poor man, without any moral qualities. He only wanted to success in a society where all the people, the politic men, the businessmen, the journalists, the women are corrupt. The only king is MONEY. The Maupassant hero, Charles Forestier is going higher and higher in the society scale thanks to his seduction poser. He is in love with all the women who could help him in his action to climb the society stapes. At the end of the novel, he married himself with the biggest daily paper owner's daughter, in the greatest church of Paris : "La Madeleine". "Le Tout Paris" is there. He has a fortune and more, he will become a member of Parliament and later a Minister. The "useless" women are out of his view, but he is always keeping in touch with the pretty and the usefull women. The picture "THE PRIVATE AFFAIRS OF BEL AMI" is a story of MORALITY. It is everything, but not a story in the Maupassant idea. Why had they put "BEL AMI" in its title ?
