Skunkyrate Gripping story with well-crafted characters

Holstra Boring, long, and too preachy.

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

richard-1787 I sat through this movie this evening, forcing myself to stick with it even though I never cared about any of the characters or what happened to them, because the two leads, Gérard Philippe and Michèle Morgan, were major film stars of their era and I wanted to see them in "something different," which this certainly was. They both gave fine performances, but of distasteful characters.Indeed, the whole movie is about a shabby little town in Mexico inhabited by almost uniformly distasteful characters (the doctor is, of course, the major exception). What Michèle Morgan ever sees in Philippe to fall in love with him is never explained.This is supposedly based on a work by Jean-Paul Sartre. All I could think was that, if Sartre's work is anything like this movie, it must be a very mediocre attempt at imitating Camus' masterful novel The Plague, which dealt with a plague in North Africa.A well-acted but uninteresting movie.

Jennifer Hoagland I saw this movie when it first came out, have not seen it since, but have remembered it vividly all these years. Seldom, if ever, has a film held me riveted the way this one did. Of course, I would have paid to see Michele Morgan read the Manhattan phone book, especially attired in a slip (no, I am not a lezzie). The mood created by the meningitis epidemic in Mexico and the sexual tension, created mostly by Morgan, are more enveloping than real life. This remains one of my top 10 - perhaps top 5 - favorite movies of all time. For the life of me, I cannot understand why there is neither a VHS nor a DVD version available, apparently anywhere. What can be done to rectify this situation? For years, I moaned about the lack of a DVD of The Informer. Now, one is available but only as part of the overpriced John Ford collection of some of his lesser films.Jen

Benoît A. Racine (benoit-3) `Les Orgueilleux' is one of a constellation of worthy French movies of this era that the French stopped making for two reasons: the complete lobotomy of the intellect that was the so-called New Wave and the premature death of Gérard Philipe, one of the century's finest actors. His pairing with Michèle Morgan here is inspired. (They also starred in René Clair's `Les Grandes Manoeuvres'.) In order to describe Philipe's charm, one has to evoke equal parts Leonardo DiCaprio and Laurence Olivier and imagine them cast as romantic leads in the kind of challenging narrative that is not even conceivable today, except for the odd exception. `Les Orgueilleux' is set during a typhus epidemic in a remote Mexican village and is based on Jean-Paul Sartre's novel `L'Amour rédempteur' (`Redeemed by Love', aka `Typhus'). The oversimplification of the novel's themes is compensated by Allégret's penchant for realism and his attention to details, like the long scene of Morgan enduring the discomfort and perils of a lonely hotel room during a heat wave in a third rate Mexican hotel, which is part striptease (daring for the time) and part psychological analysis. In other words, a perfect blend of commercialism and intelligence, both qualities sadly lacking from the aforementioned so-called New Wave.

withnail-4 One of the greatest films I've ever seen, this movie took me completely by surprise, considering I'd never heard of it, and the videotape cover was very cheesy. Set in a small Mexican town, the main character is a drunk who is so intoxicated throughout the movie he can hardly walk. A plague of cerebral-spinal meningitis hits the town. This film has a startlingly raw edge to it, like nothing else I've seen from the 50s, but more like a Midnight Cowboy kind of down-and-out unflinching view of human situations. One of the first images is of the drunk carrying a pig's head through the streets of town. He delivers it to a whorehouse. The prostitute offers to pay him with sex, but he chooses to be paid in tequila. There's another scene of him cleaning up vomit, and a scene where the local doctor, the drunk, and a woman tourist take turns inoculating each other in the spine with a huge needle. This is not to say that the film is shocking or gross, but simply human and realistic. The photography is utterly pure and perfect. Nearly every composition is dynamic, with a strong perspective, background and foreground in play, half the shots have some kind of movement, dolly or pan, which is used concisely and never intrusively. Every set up is intelligent, resourceful and well executed. The acting is simply brilliant, the stars are believable, realistic and likeable. I don't know the story behind this production, or why it has slipped into obscurity, but it struck me as one of the GREAT films, comparable to something by Robert Bresson(who is one of my favorite directors) so, as you can guess, I highly recommend this. It's a ten.