Product Description

After garnering international acclaim for such seminal crowd-pleasers as The Lovers and Zazie dans le métro, Louis Malle gave his fans a shock with The Fire Within (Le feu follet), a penetrating study of individual and social inertia. Maurice Ronet (Elevator to the Gallows), in an implosive, haunted performance, plays Alain Leroy, a self-destructive writer who resolves to kill himself and spends the next twenty-four hours trying to reconnect with a host of wayward friends. Unsparing in its portrait of Alain s inner turmoil and shot with remarkable clarity, The Fire Within is one of Malle's darkest and most personal films.

Special Features
* - New, restored high-definition digital transfer
* - Archival interviews with director Louis Malle and actor Maurice Ronet
* - Malle's Fire Within, a new video program featuring interviews with actor Alexandra Stewart and filmmakers Philippe Collin and Volker Schlöndorff
* - Jusqu'au 23 Juillet, a 2005 documentary short about the film and its source novel Le feu follet, by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, featuring actor Mathieu Amalric, writer Didier Daeninckx, and Cannes festival curator Pierre-Henri Deleau
* - New and improved English subtitle translation
* - PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by critic Michel Ciment and film historian Peter Cowie

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38821 in DVD
• Brand: IMAGE ENT.
• Released on: 2008-05-13
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Black & White, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Restored, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 108 minutes

Features

• After rising to international stardom with such seminal crowd-pleasers as The Lovers and Zazie dans le metro, Louis Malle gave his fans a shock with The Fire Within (Le feu follet), a penetrating study of individual and social inertia. Maurice Ronet (Elevator to the Gallows), in an implosive, haunted performance, plays Alain Leroy, a self-destructive writer who resolves to kill himself and spends

Customer Reviews

Inner Darkness in the City of Lights.
In his devastating memoir, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, author William Styron recalls wandering the streets of Paris while suffering from suicidal depression, knowing that he may never experience the city again. Louis Malle explores this same psychological wilderness in his 1963 film, The Fire Within (Le feu follet). The film follows Malle's films, The Lovers (Les Amants) (1958), Zazie in the Metro (Zazie dans le métro) (1960), and A Very Private Affair (Vie privée) (1962). Based on the novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Maurice Ronet (Elevator to the Gallows) gives a brilliant performance as Alain Leroy, an alcoholic writer at a rest home in Versailles. Depressed and disillusioned with his life, Alain decides to commit suicide after first visiting his bourgeois friends in Paris one last time, where within 24 hours, and after finishing Scott Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited, he is even more resolved to end his life. (The are many parallels between the self-destructive lives of Alain Leroy and Fitzgerald. Both are divorced, alcoholic writers living in Paris.) It is deeply affecting to watch Alain drinking at the Café de Flore, knowing that he is contemplating suicide, and knowing that he may never experience Paris again. The Fire Within is ultimately a dark study in despair and self-destruction, reminiscent in many ways of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's best work. Jeanne Moreau also stars as beautiful Alexandra Stewart.

The Criterion edition of The Fire Within features a newly restored digital transfer; interviews with director Louis Malle and actor Maurice Ronet; "Malle's Fire Within," a video program featuring interviews with actor Alexandra Stewart and filmmakers Philippe Collin and Volker Schlöndorff; "Jusqu'au 23 Juillet," a 2005 documentary short about the film and its source novel Le feu follet, by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, featuring actor Mathieu Amalric, writer Didier Daeninckx, and Cannes festival curator Pierre-Henri Deleau; and a booklet featuring new essays by critic Michel Ciment and film historian Peter Cowie. Highly recommended.

G. Merritt

Spleen
Very enchanting film well worth watching several times. Not as depressing as it sounds, it is about an ex-alcoholic, tired of life and/or unable to connect with other humans, visiting the friends who he used to party with for a last time. Beautiful shots, interesting characters, superb acting (also, Jeanne Moreau appears for a few minutes), Paris in the summer. All to the sound of Satie's Gymnopedie...

One of the best movies of Louis Malle
My favorite movie.
A story of a Parisian man who comes back from New York
after leaving his wife,and discovers the emptiness of his life.
Very depressing movie even though, very well filmed
everything happens in the Latin quarter of Paris in the 60's.
Great temoignage of what Paris looked like at the time.
With subtitles