Sirocco (1938 film)

Sirocco
Directed byPierre Chenal
Written byJacques Companéez
Simon Gantillon
Pierre Chenal
Based onLa maison du Maltais by Jean Vignaud
Produced byBernard Natan
André Parant
Charles Smadja
Rodolphe Solmsen
StarringViviane Romance
Louis Jouvet
Pierre Renoir
Marcel Dalio
CinematographyCurt Courant
Edited byBorys Lewin
Music byMahieddine Bachtarzi
Jacques Ibert
Production
companies
Compagnie Cinématographique de France
Gladiator Films
Distributed byCompagnie Cinématographique de France
Release date
  • 22 September 1938 (1938-09-22)
Running time
90 minutes
CountryFrance
LanguageFrench

Sirocco or The Maltese House (French: La maison du Maltais) is a 1938 French drama film directed by Pierre Chenal and starring Viviane Romance, Louis Jouvet, Pierre Renoir and Marcel Dalio.[1] It was shot at the Saint-Maurice Studios in Paris.[2] The film's sets were designed by the art director Georges Wakhévitch. It is an adaptation of a novel by Jean Vignaud, which had previously been made into the 1928 silent film Karina the Dancer, but made significant changed to the plot. It has been categorised as a film noir.[3][4]

Synopsis

In the Tunisian port city of Sfax, the half Maltese Matteo meets and falls in love with Safia a prostitute. Finding herself pregnant when he is wrongly believed to have vanished at sea, she heads to Paris in the company of an archaeologist André Chervin to be his wife. Three years later Matteo arrives in Paris, but his efforts to reclaim her love are thwarted by a number of obstacles thrown in his way. These partly come from a blackmailing private detective Rossignol who Safia who had once hired to find out about Matteo, but is now threatening to expose her past. Ultimately seeing the life that Chervin can offer their young daughter, Matteo makes the self-sacrificing decision not to interfere.

Cast

References

  1. ↑ Kennedy-Karpat p.200
  2. ↑ https://www.unifrance.org/film/35518/la-maison-du-maltais
  3. ↑ Walker-Morrison p.218
  4. ↑ Spicer p.454

Bibliography

  • Goble, Alan. The Complete Index to Literary Sources in Film. Walter de Gruyter, 1999.
  • Kennedy-Karpat, Colleen. Rogues, Romance, and Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s. Fairleigh Dickinson, 2013.
  • Spicer, Andrew. Historical Dictionary of Film Noir. Scarecrow Press, 2010.
  • Walker-Morrison, Deborah. Classic French Noir: Gender and the Cinema of Fatal Desire. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.
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