Product Description

One of the all-time great comedy classics, René Clair's À Nous la Liberté is a skillful satire of the industrial revolution and the blind quest for wealth. Deftly integrating his signature musical-comedy technique with pointed social criticism, Clair tells the story of an escaped convict who becomes a wealthy industrialist. Unfortunately his past returns to upset his carefully laid plans. Featuring lighthearted wit, tremendous visual innovation, and masterful manipulation of sound, À Nous la Liberté is both a potent indictment of mechanized modern society and an uproarious comic delight.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32091 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2002-08-20
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, DVD, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 83 minutes

Customer Reviews

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... The film is fully intact as Clair intended, and the deleted scenes are available for us to see. The circumstances of these cuts by Clair are fully explained on the DVD's deleted scene menu pages (Clair cut the scenes between the original release and the 1950 reissue), so it is totally inaccurate to say that the film has been "mutilated" since it was the director who made the cuts. The reviewer from Lincoln needs to pay a little more attention to history and stop writing such misleading gibberish.

An Unquestionable Classic
Perhaps the most elegantly rendered feature film of the very early days of sound production (barring, perhaps, Chaplin's CITY LIGHTS), Clair's classic is such a seemingly effortless blend of romantic melancholy, bitter social criticism and gentle surrealism, that its many aesthetic qualities tend to overshadow the film's astounding technological innovations in the poetics of sound.
The fact that Criterion has thrown Clair's short film ENTR'ACTE onto the disc is reason enough to buy the dvd. The transfers of both the feature and the short are of superlative quality. It's an invaluable release.

A Nous La Liberte
A brilliant, elegant and sparkling French comedy. It resembles Chaplin's Modern Times, but is in many ways even funnier in depicting the similarity between factory and prison.