WHILE PARIS SLEEPS
IMDB
Título original: While Paris Sleeps
Título del estreno en España: Mientras París duerme
Director: Allan Dwan
Año: 1932
País: USA
Guión: Basil Woon
Producción: Fox Film
Intérpretes: Victor McLaglen, Helen Mack, William Bakewell, Jack La Rue, Rita La Roy
Duración: 62 min.
Argumento: La acción tiene lugar en París, cuando un preso llamado Jacques Costard (Victor McLaglen) escapa de la cárcel con el objetivo de salvar a su hija Manon (Helen Mack) de una banda de delincuentes que la ha raptado para servir en redes de prostitución. Algo que no será fácil porque no sabe adónde han llevado a la muchacha. Además, para enredar las cosas, ella cree que su padre murió como un héroe en la Primera Guerra Mundial.
Datos Técnicos:
Spoiler:
While Paris Sleeps (1932 Allan Dwan).avi [717.30 Mb] 
Ripeo encontrado en el emule. Ojalá aparezcan subtítulos para este Dwan que tiene buenas referencias, protagonizado por Victor McLaglen.
Comentarios:
- “…Aunque hemos descubierto una película apasionante, While Paris Sleeps, cuya dramatización visual, la utilización de las sombras y la niebla prefiguran ya ciertas películas francesas del «realismo poético». (Tavernier & Coursodon en “50 años de cine norteamericano”).
- “…maravillosa” (Andy Rector).
- David Cairns:
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WHILE PARIS SLEEPS more than lived up to La Faustin’s recommendation. This racy, nasty pre-code unfolds in a fallen world of unbelievable cruelty and darkness, although it’s enacted on beautiful sets (Fox Films’ Paris sets may have been left over from SEVENTH HEAVEN, they certainly look similar).
Right at the start, war hero Victor McLaglan escapes from a hellish prison and heads for Paris. The wardens believe him dead, and smugly affirm that it’s for the best, when a man is already “mentally dead.” They also seem to have no sympathy for the fact that he got a letter saying his wife was dying and his daughter about to be destitute. This is a cartoonishly unsympathetic story world we’re in.
To confirm this, we get a scene of the daughter, Helen Mack, being kicked out of her apartment because her mother’s funeral cleaned out her savings. The vicious old concierge more or less advises her to go on the streets to earn her keep. The nice Helen has no intention of doing so, but the rest of the plot concerns a scheme to lure her into a life of sexual slavery, so perhaps she’ll end up like Mollie Molloy, her character in HIS GIRL FRIDAY.
Mack is really cute in this, with a slightly daffy, cockeyed Helen Chandler quality (but sexier). Fiendish Jack La Rue takes a fancy to her, and since we soon see him baking a snitch alive in an oven, this seems like a troubling development.
Of course, the boulangerie is a place of primal terror for all Americans. One thinks of the poor guy suspended by his thumbs in a baker’s basement in REIGN OF TERROR, as Arnold Moss politely asks Robert “Terror of Strasbourg” Cummings “Whyncha eat yer bun?” The association of French pastry-making with torture and murder is easy to explain: doesn’t every bakery in Paris have a sign above the door that reads “PAIN”?
The film’s other top pre-code moment is Mack’s nude scene, semi-espied through a translucent screen, as naughty La Rue peeps over the top. This scene is suggestive enough to make a BluRay release mandatory, so we can see how much detail is visible. I can’t stress enough how cute Helen Mack is… Anyway, La Rue’s hardboiled girlfriend Fifi (Rita La Roy) soon comes in and bashes him over the head with a French loaf, cementing the connection between bread and violence.
McLaglan is like Ron Perlman in CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, a hulking single-motivation man-muscle, pummeling his way through life’s problems with two fists, two neurons and an undying love in his heart. When he’s simple, he’s terrific. There’s an awkward scene, however, when he parts from Mack, having decided not to identify himself as her long-lost dad. He pauses, thinks, frowns, wipes away a tear, sniffs, sighs, and does everything but hold up a signpost reading “EMOTIONAL”. McLaglan is like Wallace Beery in that his boorishness is quite believable and strangely appealing as such, but when he does schmaltz it has a queasy effect akin to watching a balrog make kissy-faces.
Interesting how in this movie all the young lovers (Mack and William Bakewell, who’s just the right side of sappy) want to do is escape Paris and go live on a farm. Seems counter-intuitive to me, somehow. Still, the portrait of civilisation is so relentlessly unsympathetic, the idea of surrounding oneself with a protective screen of livestock makes a kind of sense.
Despite Lubitsch’s assertion that Paramount Paris was more Parisian than the real thing, Fox Films Paris is my favourite, a grimy, rough-hewn, round-edged place of stone and shadow and fog, with the awesome feeling of a gutter as viewed by a microbe. Of course, the prime bug is Jack La Rue, his nose spread across his face as wide as his shit-eating grin. Dwan at first seems almost afraid of that face, as if he’s not too sure what it’ll do to his camera, but at the very end of Dwan’s second big scene he finally steels himself tracks in on it, as JLR puffs and exhales satanically on his Gauloise.
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The prolific Mr. Allan Dwan, who started directing, as Orson Welles remarked to me, “Sometime around the invention of the electric light,” had an under-the-radar sleeper this year with While Paris Sleeps, starring Victor McLaglen, which I saw in 1969: “Most evocatively directed and photographed melodrama about a condemned man who escapes back to Paris to see his daughter and the good he does her---all anonymously so that her faith in her martyred father-image is not destroyed; in fact, he dies for her. The plot does not convey the sensitively and skill with which it is told---the film has the look of the thirties French films that had not even been made yet; the gloomy, foggy, shadowy mood is expressively captured, and the direction of camera is evocative, simple and quite beautiful. Among Dwan’s best early talkies, revealing the great silent film skill he had as well as his easy acceptance of dialog. A minor revelation.” Saludos
nyxnet escribió:¡Subtítulos españoles ya disponibles!
Y para los rezagados, la película en descarga directa:
Película en descarga directa
Subtítulos en español
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