A Monkey in Winter (1962)
Genre : Drama, Comedy
Runtime : 1H 45M
Director : Henri Verneuil
Synopsis
The story of a man who has stopped drinking- and then dreaming- and who thanks to a young man who tries to forget a lost love in alcohol will turn drunk again during an exciting night.
A gangster escapes jail and quickly makes plans to continue his criminal ways elsewhere, but a determined inspector is closing in.
Marec, a truck driver is sent by his boss to track down through the Morroccan desert a reckless youngster who stole a brand-new truck and its payload. Riddled with bad luck, Marec will face the dangers of the desert, as well as a fishy partner, and a reluctant, misogynist tow-truck helper until the climactic fight.
This movie is a Marcel Aymé adaptation and it deals with the not-so-glorious side of the Occupation: black market, war profiteers, cracking open bottles of Champagne while most of the Parisians are almost starving.
June 1946: Stalin invites Russian emigres to return to the motherland. It's a trap: when a ship-load from France arrives in Odessa, only a physician and his family are spared execution or prison. He and his French wife (her passport ripped up) are sent to Kiev. She wants to return to France immediately; he knows that they are captives and must watch every step.
An intricate thriller about an ordinary man thrust into the biggest theft of Soviet information of the Cold War. Right after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A French businessman based in Moscow, Pierre Froment, makes an unlikely connection with Grigoriev, a senior KGB officer disenchanted with what the Communist ideal has become under Brezhnev. Grigoriev begins passing Froment highly sensitive information about the Soviet spy network in the US.
Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain), a single schoolteacher and Jean (Vincent Lindon), discover an unexpected bond that causes them to question the direction of their lives. They move in different social circles but their relationship develops and their lives begin gradually to unravel.
During World War II, French Commandos join forces with a German officer in order to survive the African desert.
When Lise's car bumps Antoine's bike, they recognize each other from a brief fling 20 years before while at the Sorbonne. He's now a professor of Greek; she's loathe to tell him she's a police inspector. A call interrupts their first dinner date: a Deputy of the National Assembly has been murdered. She has a suspect, another Deputy, and must track him while deflecting Antoine's eye from her vocation. All roads in the inquiry lead to Christine Vallier, the dead Deputy's mistress, a beguiling 22-year-old whose mother ran the Assembly's snack bar. When more deputies die and Antoine learns Lise's identity, she must act quickly solve the crime and save her future.
Désespéré par la mort de sa femme, le banquier René Duchesne se promène le long de la Seine. Seule la rencontre de Suzanne, son ancienne femme de chambre lui révélant les infidélités de Madame, le sauve du suicide. Monsieur décide alors d'aider sa protégée à sortir de la prostitution, et d'empêcher ses beaux-parents de faire main basse sur l'héritage.
The Muller company organizes a reception to mark the launch of a new product. During the evening, we discover that this is actually a coaching exercise for company executives. Gradually, rumours about the upcoming acquisition of the company start to emerge and everyone finds themselves trying to save their place.
Arthur and Anatole are two little robbers. They want to rob money, money that will travel in a special train from Paris to Bruxelles. They don't know that other people have planned to do the same thing.
Bum Archimède wants to spend the winter in prison, but to get there proves not to be that easy.
A maths teacher acquires the power to travel into movies to save the woman of his dreams and bring her back to her correct film.
When they realize the times are changing, five crooks decide to switch from bank robberies to personality abductions.
An ambitious teaching student's finals studies are interrupted by a passionate affair with a jazz musician.
A starving gendarme, wasting away from hunger, is reduced to grabbing castoff snacks from fat American tourists. When he sees as old woman feeding pigeons, in desperation he hits on the bizarre idea of dressing up as one...
Alphonse Brown, who firmly believes he is the bastard son of James Brown, meets up with his best friend Scotch after Brown gets out of jail. On their way to Paris to begin careers as recording artists, the pair stumbles across a potent type of marijuana that was engineered by the Nazis. Their decision to begin selling the stuff leads to a variety of people chasing after them.
An unlikely friendship between a dour, working class butcher and a repressed schoolteacher coincides with a grisly series of Ripper-type murders in a provincial French town.
Alexandre, a young and honest farmer, is oppressed by an authoritarian wife, who makes him work like a dog. When she dies in a car crash, he decides to stay in bed, absolutely free and inactive. Just a dog is occupied to carry food and newspapers to him.
An aging gangster, Fernand Naudin is hoping for a quiet retirement when he suddenly inherits a fortune from an old friend, a former gangster supremo known as the Mexican. If he is ambivalent about his new found wealth, Fernand is positively nonplussed to discover that he has also inherited his benefactor’s daughter, Patricia. Unfortunately, not only does Fernand have to put up with the thoroughly modern Patricia and her nauseating boyfriend, but he also had to contend with the Mexican’s trigger-happy former employees, who are determined to make a claim.
Two unlikely companions must smuggle four suitcases filled with contraband pork across Nazi-occupied Paris.
One-time gangster Antoine is enjoying retirement on the coast, now managing a boating club. He receives a visit from a former accomplice who asks for a loan. The money will be repaid by a crook who is now in hiding; Antoine intends to recover his money.
A great French restaurant's owner, Monsieur Septime, is thrust into intrigue and crime, when one of his famous guests disappears.
This film originated as a play in Paris. The story focuses on the one-day adventures of Bertrand Barnier played with a genius of French cinema, Louis de Funes. In the same morning he learns that his daughter is pregnant, an employee stole a large amount of money from his company, his maid is about to resign in order to marry a wealthy neighbor and his body builder is interested in marrying his daughter. The seemingly complicated story-line is full of comedy or errors and some of the most hilarious mime scenes of the French cinema.
In this Frenco-Italian gangster parody, a shop keeper on his way to an Italian holiday suffers a crash which totals his car. The culprit can only compensate his ruined trip by driving an American friends car from Napels to Bordeaux, but as it happens to be filled with such contraband as stolen money, jewelry and drugs, the involuntary and unwitting companions in crime soon attract all but recreational attention from the "milieu".
Roger Santet is a convicted murderer sprung from prison by the Sicilian clan headed by the aging Vittorio Manalese. They conspire to steal a large cache of jewels from an exhibit in Rome. As they are preparing for the heist, the mobster's American friend Tony Nicosia suggests that a better way to get the rocks would be to hijack the transport plane while it is en route to New York. The dogged inspector Le Goff is using all the available resources to thwart their plans. Though the heist itself is successful, Santet finds himself trapped by the mob because of his fling with Manalese's daughter-in-law.
In a run-down South American town, four men are paid to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin into the jungle through to the oil field. Friendships are tested and rivalries develop as they embark upon the perilous journey.
"Le Dabe" retired many years ago and now he lives in the Tropics where he owns stables and horses. He is a very rich man. He was the king of all money counterfeiters. He is contacted from Paris to organize a new job. He says no. But when he finds out the the currency that should be counterfeited is the Dutch florin, he accepts immediately. He retired after having counterfeited 100 florin notes just before the Queen Wilhelmina retired them from circulation. He flies to Paris. But the gang is not to be trusted, at least not all of them.
Louis-Philippe Fourchaume, another typical lead-role for French comedy superstar Louis de Funès, is the dictatorial CEO of a French company which designs and produces sail yachts, and fires in yet another tantrum his designer André Castagnier, not realizing that man is his only chance to land a vital contract with the Italian magnate Marcello Cacciaperotti. So he has to find him at his extremely rural birthplace in 'la France profonde', which proves a torturous odyssey for the spoiled rich man; when he does get there his torment is far from over: the country bumpkin refuses to resume his slavish position now the shoe is on the other foot, so Fourchaume is dragged along in the boorish family life, and at times unable to control his temper, which may cost him more credit then he painstakingly builds up...
Set during the period of growing influence of the Indian independence movement in the British Raj, the story begins with the arrival in India of a British woman, Miss Adela Quested, who is joining her fiancé, a city magistrate named Ronny Heaslop. She and Ronny's mother, Mrs. Moore, befriend an Indian doctor, Aziz H. Ahmed.
Secret agent OSS 117 foils Nazis, beds local beauties, and brings peace to the Middle East.
Two buddy farmers are visited by aliens who like their domestic cabbage soup.
Charles, fresh out of jail, rejects his wife's plan for a quiet life of bourgeois respectability. He enlists a former cell mate, Francis, to assist him in pulling off one final score, a carefully planned assault on the vault of a Cannes casino.
When they realize the times are changing, five crooks decide to switch from bank robberies to personality abductions.
Ralf Milan, a hitman, arrives in Montpellier to kill an important witness. He checks in a hotel without knowing that his neighbour has become neurotic after his wife left him.
Francis, the boss of a small plumbing supply company, is harassed by tax collectors, striking employees, and an impossible wife and daughter. His only joy is sharing lunch with his friend Gerard. Then a TV show called "where are you?" shows a woman from Gers who is searching for her husband who disappeared 28 years ago. The lost husband looks like an identical twin of Francis...
Ariane Felder is pregnant! This is surprising with her being a young hardened judge with strict morals. But what is more surprising is that, according to paternity testing, the child's father is none other than Bob, a criminal from the prosecution charged with an atrocious attack! Ariane doesn't remember any of what has happened, so she has no idea what to expect...
During World War II, two French civilians and a downed British Bomber Crew set out from Paris to cross the demarcation line between Nazi-occupied Northern France and the South. From there they will be able to escape to England. First, they must avoid German troops - and the consequences of their own blunders.
Charles Duchemin, a well-known gourmet and publisher of a famous restaurant guide, is waging a war against fast food entrepreneur Tri- catel to save the French art of cooking. After having agreed to appear on a talk show to show his skills in naming food and wine by taste, he is confronted with two disasters: his son wants to become a clown rather than a restaurant tester and he, the famous Charles Duchemin, has lost his taste!