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(aka "Fausse alerte" or "Abri 39" or "Un soir d'alerte" or "À Paris un soir")
Directed by Jacques de Baroncelli
France 1945
Born into poverty, Josephine Baker rose from a childhood living in a St. Louis slum to the toast of France - captivating audiences through the stage, recordings and motion pictures, and you'll get to see why in The French Way. It's a farcical romantic-comedy set in contemporary WWII France, about young lovers forbidden to marry by their respective families. Baker, as Zazu, the owner of a nightclub, inherits a job restoring harmony between the two families and allowing the young lovers to 'se marier.' A mélange of French character actors add to the fun, but when Josephine's on the screen she is as Ernest Hemingway once said, the most sensational woman anyone ever saw. The French Way filmed in 1940 -- literally amidst bombing raids - released in France in 1945, and briefly shown in the USA in 1952 where the order of some scenes was changed and about 2-3 minutes of dramatic footage was cut. In all other respects, it is virtually complete as originally released. Note: In real life, Josephine Baker aided the French Resistance and was awarded, among other honors, the Croix de Guerre by the French military. *** The French Way (Fausse Alert) stars American expatriate musical star Josephine Baker as a Parisian cabaret singer. The plot is your standard "star-crossed lovers" melange, distinguished by the conspicuous lack of clothing on the female characters. The coy ingenue is played by 18-year-old Micheline Presle, several years removed from her international stardom vis-a-vis Devil in the Flesh. Because Josephine Baker was black, and because she performed in the nude for the most part, The French Way didn't make it to American shores until 1952. Even then, Ms. Baker's climactic feather dance was entirely excised, though the film spends its last two reels building up to it. |
Poster
Release: July 27th, 1945
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Review:
Kit Parker Films - Region FREE - Blu-ray
Box Cover |
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Distribution |
Kit Parker Films Region FREE Blu-ray |
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Runtime | 1:14:31.967 | |
Video |
Disc Size: 21,428,692,391 bytes Feature Size: 20,985,944,064 bytes Bitrate: 34.14 Mbps1080P Single-layered Blu-ray MPEG-4 AVC Video |
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Bitrate: | ||
Audio |
LPCM Audio French 1536 kbps 2.0 / 48 kHz / 1536 kbps / 16-bit |
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Subtitles | English (burned-in) | |
Features |
Release
Information: Studio: Kit Parker Films
Disc Size: 21,428,692,391 bytes Feature Size: 20,985,944,064 bytes Bitrate: 34.14 Mbps1080P Single-layered Blu-ray MPEG-4 AVC Video
Edition Details: Chapters: 13 |
Comments: |
NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.
Kit Parker Films give us an HD digital restoration of
The French Way (Fausse Alerte) on a
single-layered
Blu-ray
disc. With the English language title (but the French
language throughout) this appears to be the cut US
version referenced in the comments above - missing about
2-3 minutes - probably avec nudity. The image quality -
from possibly the best print source available - is not
stellar and has inconsistencies. The transfer has a
max'ed out bitrate but looks waxy and possibly digitized
with blown-out whites and a fuzzy kind of grain. There
are some sequences that look superior but generally the
image quality is sub-standard for the genre and, as I
stated, probably more the fault of the source.
We'd love to have something to compare or see more
Josephine Baker make it to 1080P. Gary Tooze |
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Subtitle Samples - Dialogue TOP - sung lyrics - BOTTOM