Paul Bonifas
Birth : 1902-06-03, Paris, France
Death : 1975-11-09
History
Paul Bonifas (3 June 1902 – 9 November 1975) was a French actor, born in Paris.
In the 1920s, while working for the French customs service, Bonifas took classes in acting at the Conservatoire de Paris in his spare time. He left with the first prize for comedy, which allowed him to join the Odéon Theatre in 1933, then the Comédie-Française in 1938.
He made his first film appearance in 1935 in a version of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, directed by Pierre Chenal.
During World War II he served as a lieutenant in the artillery, was badly wounded, and evacuated from Dunkirk with his unit. In London he joined the Free French, and worked for Radio Londres broadcasting to occupied France.
In 1942 he appeared in the film The Foreman Went to France.
In 1943 he formed "The Molière Players", who staged a repertoire of mainly Molière works in London theatres, as well as in regional towns and at French army barracks.
In 1944 "The Molière Players" appeared in the short film Aventure malgache directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This was written by, and based on the experiences of, Jules Francois Clermont, an actor in Bonifas' troupe working under the name of Paul Clarus, who had operated an illegal radio station Madagascar Libre in Madagascar while the island was under Vichy control.
Bonifas then appeared in a number of other British films, including Two Fathers with Bernard Miles, directed by Anthony Asquith, and had minor roles in the musicals Heaven Is Round the Corner and Champagne Charlie, the action adventure film The Man from Morocco, the comedy-drama Johnny Frenchman and the horror film Dead of Night.
Bonifas returned to France in 1946 and resumed his career in theatre, specializing in comedy, but also taking dramatic roles.
His later film career included appearances in Trapeze (1956), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956), Fanny (1961), Charade (1963), Greed in the Sun (1964), The Train (1964), Is Paris Burning? (1966), Triple Cross (1966), and The Return of the Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1974).
Bonifas died on 9 November 1975 at Vernouillet, Yvelines, France.
Source: Article "Paul Bonifas" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Vatinol
Celeste has failed with Victor and has a little boy. Césaire would still like to marry Céleste, a beautiful and hard-working girl. His father, old Amable, did not hear him that way but ended up giving in. Less than a year later, Césaire dies. Between Father Amable and his daughter-in-law, a cold and silent war begins.
le choeur
le père de François Perrin
With 'little captain' Cambrai raising serious doubts about the reality of the so-called "super spy", Colonel Toulouse kidnaps Christine and forces Francois to play again the character of "The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe" in some fake adventures. All this to stop the investigation into the death of Colonel Milan.
Le voisin
Two people, a Frenchman Julien Maroyeur and a Jewish German woman (Anna Kupfer) met on a train while escaping the German army entering France.
Le portier de l'hôtel
Alain Revent, a seductive and refined man, derives a peculiar satisfaction from debasing his wives. The first, driven to the brink of despair, throws herself out of a window. Enlisting the help of an equally perverse casual acquaintance, Dino, the "handsome brute" proceeds to emotionally torture his second wife, Nathalie. The sadistic plan is picked up on by Officer Leroy who suspects the truth. Will he be able to snatch the unfortunate woman from the evil Alain's clutches?
The doctor
During the Korean War, Joe Moran, is convicted for striking a colonel. Imprisoned in Germany he encounters his former company commander Captain Ross, jailed for black marketeering. Together with Ross' cohorts Joe agrees to escape with them, but things go wrong and a policeman is killed. An appalled Joe escapes by himself, abandoning the others, who are recaptured. Years later Joe has a boat rental business where he is found by Ross. Now a wanted drug smuggler he wants the use of Joe's boats and to ensure his cooperation, they kidnap his wife and daughter.
Un témoin lors de l'accident dela voiture
Auguste Maroilleur, an elderly farmer, exploits 400 hectares of crop land with the help of his family, over which he rules with an iron hand. Things go awry the day he discovers one of his grandsons is involved in drug traffic. To make matters worse, the reckless youth has hidden the white powder in the Maroilleur farm. Without a moment's hesitation, Auguste gets rid of the toxic substance but, of course, the mob has different views...
A young student meets an elderly antiques-loving couple looking for a help. They like her very much, and she's hired on the spot.
(uncredited)
A French-American millionaire, his girlfriend and his war buddy try to grant his dying son's every wish.
Gustave / servant
Wendy is the British guest of a French couple and the daughter of the man who saved the host's life during World War II. Living with the couple is their 20-year-old son and a 12-year-old nephew whose parents were killed in an automobile accident. The father and son both try to seduce the attractive guest. The young boy retreats into his own world and dreams of being taken back to Britain by Wendy in this romantic drama. The mother spends her time bleaching her hair and is seemingly uninterested in anything that goes on with her family at the beachfront villa. Meanwhile, Wendy and the younger boy develop a fondness for each other, while his aunt and uncle fail to understand his needs.
Charlie
A safecracker turns double agent during WWII.
In this excoriating satire of the fashion industry, Polly Maggoo is a 20-year-old Brooklyn-born fashion model in Paris, on the runway at the big shows where magazine editor Ms. Maxwell is the reigning opinion maker. The ridiculous passes for sublime. Polly becomes the subject of an episode of a vapid TV news documentary series called "Qui êtes-vous?" and is pursued by the filmmaker and by the prince of Borodine, a small country in the Soviet bloc.
'Tonton Louis'
Paul is an accomplished teacher at Janson-de-Sailly. A "good guy" who, having returned for the holidays to the provincial town where he was raised, finds Véronique, his childhood friend. He falls madly in love...
Légiste (uncredited)
Lucky Jo and his three friends are little criminals, who try to live from small burglaries. But they never have luck - ever so often something inpredictable happens to Jo and gets one of them arrested. While Jo is in prison once again, they decide they'd better do without him in future. He decides to help them secretly...and unfortunately.
Spinet
As the Allied forces approach Paris in August 1944, German Colonel Von Waldheim is desperate to take all of France's greatest paintings to Germany. He manages to secure a train to transport the valuable art works even as the chaos of retreat descends upon them. The French resistance however wants to stop them from stealing their national treasures but have received orders from London that they are not to be destroyed. The station master, Labiche, is tasked with scheduling the train and making it all happen smoothly but he is also part of a dwindling group of resistance fighters tasked with preventing the theft. He and others stage an elaborate ruse to keep the train from ever leaving French territory.
Doctor Magnart, former professor in Lyon
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.
Le notaire
Jeff Gordon, FBI agent, infiltrates a gang and finds himself in the midst of a gang war.
Mr. Felix
After Regina Lampert falls for the dashing Peter Joshua on a skiing holiday in the French Alps, she discovers upon her return to Paris that her husband has been murdered. Soon, she and Peter are giving chase to three of her late husband's World War II cronies, Tex, Scobie and Gideon, who are after a quarter of a million dollars the quartet stole while behind enemy lines. But why does Peter keep changing his name?
Mons. Lapeyre
A bourgeois family, who is harassed and humiliated, ruins their young maids without pay for several years.
Grocer
The tragic story of a young orphan girl who is befriended by an innocent but emotionally disabled veteran of the French Indochina War.
Chandelier
Le chirurgien / Doctor of Louis XI
Charles le Temeraire asks in marriage Jeanne de Beauvais, daughter of King Louis XI, wishing to get her valuable lands in dowry. The King is wise to this, and since his daughter does not feel inclined to accept, he refuses. Charles sets up a plan to abduct the prince, in a way that the suspicions will fall upon Robert de Neuville, a noble enamoured of the princess. Robert manages to free her from the castle where she was being kept. Charles keeps setting traps, and managing people to perjure against Jeanne, and the King himself. Finally, Jeanne escapes alive from a pack of wolves, who set watching the lady alone in the snow covered woods, instead of attacking her. Charles does yet accuse her of being a witch - wishing to have her dead rather than being the wife of Robert... Robert will be her champion in a Judgement of God. Will the 'miracle of the wolfs' repeat itself, or fearless Charles defeat Robert in the sword duel?
The Postman
Almost 19-year-old Marius feels himself in a rut in Marseille, his life planned for him by his cafe'-owning father, and he longs for the sea. The night before he is to leave on a 5-year voyage, Fanny, a girl he grew up with, reveals that she is in love with him, and he discovers that he is in love with her. He must choose between an exciting life at sea, and a boring life with the woman he loves. And Fanny must choose between keeping the man she loves, and letting him live the life he seems to want.
Cellarman
Middle-aged businesswoman Paula Tessier resists the advances of Philip Van der Besh, the 24-year-old son of one of her clients. But when her longtime paramour, Roger Demarest, begins yet another casual affair with a younger woman, Paula decides that two can play that game. However, it seems that society looks differently at May-December romances when the woman is the older partner.
Un greffier
As Dominique Marceau is being tried for the murder of Gilbert Tellier, accounts by different witnesses paint a picture of the kind of relationship the two used to share.
Mayor
OSS agent, working with the French underground, ambushes Nazi convoy with high-ranking general, who escapes. Later they take him from a Nazi prison and smuggle him to England.
le président de la cour
Le médecin de l'hôpital
Victor Hugo's monumental novel Les Miserables has been filmed so often that sometimes it's hard to tell one version from another. One of the best and most faithful adaptations is this 240-minute French production, starring Jean Gabin as the beleaguered Jean Valjean. Arrested for a petty crime, Valjean spends years 20 in the brutal French penal system. Even upon his release, his trail is dogged by relentless Inspector Javert. Valjean's efforts to create a new life for himself despite the omnipresence of Javert is meticulously detailed in this film, which utilizes several episodes from the Hugo original that had hitherto never been dramatized. Originally released as a single film, Les Miserables was usually offered as a two-parter outside of France.
L'inspecteur Renaud
Michel Piccoli plays a police inspector whose best friend is murdered on the orders of gang boss Charles Vanel. The inspector knows full well that Vanel is too crafty and well-connected to ever stand trial for his crime, so he carefully lays a subtle trap for his adversary. Unfortunately, both Piccoli and Vanel are thwarted by a pair of scheming females.
Marcel, owner of the hotel
Police Chief (uncredited)
Lovestruck conservatory student Ariane pretends to be just as much a cosmopolitan lover as the worldly mature Frank Flannagan hoping that l’amour will take hold.
Guillaumin
Le Cas Du Dr. Laurent (The Case of Dr. Laurent) stars Jean Gabin as a Paris-based doctor who tries to spread the gospel of Natural Childbirth. Working in a cloistered rural community, Gabin runs up against the stone walls of fear and prejudice. His theories are proven sound when unwed mother Nicole Courcel gives birth within Gabin's methodology. The childbirth sequence is filmed straight-on with a delicate combination of taste and frankness. Nonetheless, the lurid ad campaign of Cas Du Dr. Laurent sensationalized this sequence all out of proportion.
Master Lecornu
Paris, 1482. Today is the festival of the fools, taking place like each year in the square outside Cathedral Notre Dame. Among jugglers and other entertainers, Esmeralda, a sensuous gypsy, performs a bewitching dance in front of delighted spectators. From up in a tower of the cathedral, Frollo, an alchemist, gazes at her lustfully. Later in the night, Frollo orders Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer and his faithful servant, to kidnap Esmeralda. But when the ugly freak comes close to her is touched by the young woman's beauty...
Aimé Morin, a good-natured bookseller, is also one of the candidates in the local elections of his small town. He is well-liked by most but he also has political enemies. Among them is Lagarde, a journalist close to the latter. Lagarde takes advantage of Morin being on holiday in Paris to try and tarnish his reputation. His machination unfortunately works and poor Aimé finds himself mistaken for a sex maniac.
Le réceptionniste de l'hôtel (uncredited)
A story of the love of Frou-Frou - an actress and singer in the in the beginning of her career.
le commissaire principal
Arriving in Paris, Madeleine Marsan rents a room in a guesthouse where she makes the acquaintance of Pierre Ruffin, a respectable municipal librarian. Through Pierre, Madeleine finds work as a schoolteacher and soon realises that she is in love with him. Then she discovers that Pierre is in truth the head of a band of crooks. Caught by the police after a failed robbery, Pierre manages to escape. With Madeleine’s help, he goes on the run.
Honoré, the father-in-law
Martial, Colette 's husband, is madly jealous. One day, he catches his wife writing a letter and he does want to know what this message contains, to no avail.
The Newsagent (uncredited)
Two scriptwriters argue about the fate of Henrietta, a charming and gamine shopgirl. One favors a comical path for their heroine, who is overcome with sentimental love for a young photographer on Bastille Day. The other has a more thrilling and dastardly fate in mind for her. Among the film's irresistible conceits is Hildegarde Neff as an oversexed circus bareback rider.
In 1935, in the Burgundian village of Valromey, Commissioner Desbordes was the very unpopular leader of the anti-alcoholic league. His own brother, Pimpin, is an unconditional defender of the vineyard. Pierre Moreau is, for his part, the representative of a hygienic drink, the "Koku-Kolu". The cafe owner's daughter, Rose, will find the man very to her liking and will manage to seduce him.
The inhabitants of Marboue-Chambourcy want a swimming pool, and the difficulties in realizing this expensive dream divide the village into two clans: on one side the women, on the other the men. Piedalu, whom this conflict desolates, discovers by chance, as part of a found bicycle, a fortune in gold coins.
Monsieur Bleubois
A Boston school teacher fights with a group of impoverished Frenchmen for possession of an inherited château. Elizabeth Rockwell is indignant when she finds her château filled with squatters, a widower with five messy children, who have no regard for private property rights.
Inspector
In World War II France, American soldier Michael Blake captures, then loses Nazi-collaborator art thief Paul Rona, who leaves behind a gem studded gauntlet (a stolen religious relic). Years later, financial reverses lead Mike to return in search of the object. In Paris, he must dodge mysterious followers and a corpse that's hard to explain; so he and attractive tour guide Christine decamp on a cross-country pursuit that becomes love on the run...then takes yet another turn.
François Donge, a rich industrialist and womaniser, meets a girl nicknamed Bébé who he marries. Ten years later, poisoned by his wife and dying in hospital, he recalls his married life and understands how his wife who adored him suffered from his many affairs and indifference.
Robert Vernier is assigned by the Secret Service to unmask a band of gangsters determined to get their hands on the plans for a new plane. They manage to steal part of it and kidnap Robert's fiancée, named Monique. Robert will manage to dismantle the gang and will be surprised to find that at the head there is a policeman...
Le ministre Victor Duruy
It centres on the life of the entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre and his total devotion to studying insect behavior, travelling from Avignon to Paris, from Paris to his death in Sérignan. He is honoured by the French president Raymond Poincaré and his patience, obstinacy and knowledge are also recognised by Napoleon III, the publisher Charles Delagrave and the philosopher John Stuart Mill. They reach their climax in his book, Souvenirs entomologiques.
Monsieur Bleubois
A Boston school teacher fights with a group of impoverished Frenchmen for possession of an inherited château. Elizabeth Rockwell is indignant when she finds her château filled with squatters, a widower with five messy children, who have no regard for private property rights.
Renaud, a young student who is camping alone at the moment, has a dream one night, in which the woman of his dreams appears. When he wakes up the next morning, he cannot believe his eyes: the creature of the dream is there by the side of the road, in the flesh! The woman accepts to drive Renaud to Montargis but it is only after she has dropped him off there that he realizes that what he experienced for her was love at first sight. He then decides not to return to Paris but to try and find the wonderful stranger in Montargis. He discovers that the woman's name is Clara and that she is the member of a drama company.
La capitaine du cargo
Michel has stolen from his employer, Mr Bellanger, for the love of Juliette. He is now in jail. One night, while sleeping in his cell, he wakes up all of a sudden, the gates open and he finds himself in a strange village where all the inhabitants have lost their memory. There, meets Juliette again who seems to agree to marry a powerful man, who might well be Bluebeard...
Insurance Manager (as Paul Boniface)
Bedelia Carrington is living happily, it appears, in Monte Carlo with her husband Charlie Carrington. But a cultivated young artist, Ben Chaney, begins probing into her past with curious concern. Chaney, who is really a detective, learns that Bedelia's obsession for money has led her, in the past, to husband-poisoning for the insurance money.
Stephan Corelle
A musical cabaret singer meets a British agent and goes with him to Nazi occupied France to save an atomic scientist.
Jerome
The fisherman from a Cornish village have a friendly rivalry with the fishermen (and one formidable woman) from a French port. Then war comes and they must all rethink their petty differences.
Architect Walter Craig, seeking the possibility of some work at a country farmhouse, soon finds himself once again stuck in his recurring nightmare. Dreading the end of the dream that he knows is coming, he must first listen to all the assembled guests' own bizarre tales.
French Nightclub Patron (Segment "The Ventriloquist's Dummy") (Uncredited)
Architect Walter Craig, seeking the possibility of some work at a country farmhouse, soon finds himself once again stuck in his recurring nightmare. Dreading the end of the dream that he knows is coming, he must first listen to all the assembled guests' own bizarre tales.
French Mayor
With the ending of the Spanish Civil War, a dispirited band of volunteers from the International Brigades seeks refuge in France. But on reaching the frontier, the band is disarmed, and all are detained as political prisoners. Then come instructions from Vichy that all fit prisoners are to be sent to Morocco to work on the Sahara railway for the Germans. However, one man manages to escape to London with vital information for the Allies.
Targetino
A man from the countryside becomes London’s newest music hall sensation, and competes with a rival music hall performer for the audience’s attention.
Monsieur Rolland
While Lady Christabel Beauclark, a bird fancier, is scurrying about demanding certain territorial rights for British birds from other countries, Her Ladyship's niece is falling in love with the family butler, Tom Gilbey. The birds are forgotten when war breaks out, and Gilbey now finds himself in love with the niece whose love was previously unrequited. Written by Les Adams
French Proprietor
Candlelight in Algeria is a 1944 British war film directed by George King and starring James Mason, Carla Lehmann and Raymond Lovell. This drama follows the exploits of Eisenhower's top aide, Mark Clark, and other important Allies as they journey to an important meeting held on Algeria's coast. The precise location of this vital secret gathering is upon a piece of film which must not fall into enemy hands
Michel
A former leader of the French Resistance finds that one of his fellow actors looks like a detestable official he knew in Madagascar during the war. He tells about his time, operating an illegal radio station while evading the Nazis.
Prefect of Rouville
Based on the true story of Melbourne Johns, an aircraft factory foreman sent to France to prevent the Nazis getting hold of some vital equipment.
The hunter at Maxim's, whose family is unaware of the profession, turns around and plans to marry his daughter to a marquis when he recognizes a regular in this nobility. Everyone meets at Maxim's where, unmasked, the hunter agrees to marry his daughter to the reveler but repentant Marquis.
Some try to travel around the world with a time constraint, but Lavarède has to perform an even harder task than Phineas Fogg. His assignment is to go around the globe with a mere five cents coin. Worse, he can't even spend it or else he will not come into the money of his inheritance. To make sure Lavarède plays by the rules of the game, two supervisors stick to him like a shadow. Will the young man meet this unbelievable challenge?
