![]() Romero died this past Sunday, July 16, at the age of 77.Įveryone who has had a nodding acquaintance with the popular culture of the past quarter-century or so knows what zombies are. (Any number of other films in the French crime series, including The Wages of Fear , Rififi and Touchez pas au grisbi ( Don't Touch the Loot, 1954] as well as in the related film series centered on filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville can make that claim, too.)įilmmaker George A. Hire ( Monsieur Hire's Engagement), a movie that is Panique’s superior in virtually every way. But you can catch a variation on the same film in Patrice Leconte’s 1989 Monsieur Hire, also based on Georges Simenon’s 1933 short novel Les Fiançailles de M. It’s a movie whose lofty ambitions aren’t quite reached. Usually these neglected films, revived for audiences who may not know of them, turn out to be worth your time but Panique, though not entirely devoid of interest, isn’t one of them. One highlight - or, at least, they think it is - in their series Panique: French Crime Classics, is the revival of Julien Duvivier’s 1946 Panique (Panic ), a dramatic film starring Michel Simon as Monsieur Hire, an unpopular man who is suspected of murdering an elderly woman and whose presumed innocence is quickly thrown by the wayside as his neighbours hound him to a tragic fate. TIFF Bell Lightbox, the Toronto International Film Festival’s year-round screening centre, is presenting French classic cinema this summer in Toronto, as it often does during the warm months. Note: The following contains spoilers for Panique (1946) and Monsieur Hire (1989). They’re joined by a wide cast of characters that peoples (or haunts) the graveyard, ranging across every conceivable social, racial, and moral division within their society and often replicating those same hierarchies in death as in life. Willie and his companions don’t know that they’re dead, and in large part their ignorance propels the plot of the novel. Here, he encounters a panoply of strange new neighbors, such as the naked Hans Vollman and the youthful Roger Bevins III, who sprouts a multitude of eyes and arms whenever he begins rhapsodizing about the beauty of the world that he’s left behind, as if trying to adequately appreciate the entirety of creation. Interred in his grave, Willie finds himself in bardo, a liminal state between life and death that features in some Buddhist interpretations of the afterlife. However, in this case the titular Lincoln is not Abraham, but rather his son Willie, who died in February of 1862, when the Civil War had been raging for less than a year. ![]() The sixteenth president of the United States has fascinated writers and artists ever since his emergence on the national stage, leading most recently to films such as Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, best-selling nonfiction such as Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, and shlock like the “mashup novel” Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and its movie adaptation. ![]() Tibetan theology and the private grief of Abraham Lincoln might not seem like two subjects that naturally go together, but George Saunders masterfully interweaves them in his stunning novel Lincoln in the Bardo. ![]()
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