A Man Escaped
by Robert Bresson
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Charles Le Clainche, Fran?ois Leterrier, Jacques Ertaud, Maurice Beerblock, Roland MonodDirector: Robert Bresson
Cinematographer: L?once-Henri Burel
Writer: Robert Bresson
Editor: Raymond Lamy
Producer: Alain Poir?
Producer: Jean Thuillier
Writer: Andr? Devigny
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 99 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-05-25
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: New Yorker Video
Movie Reviews of A Man Escaped
Movie Review: Well worth watching
Summary: 5 Stars
This 1956 film demonstrates that a small budget doesn't mean a bad film. It clearly deserved to win the twin awards: "Best Director, Cannes Film Festival," and "Best Film of the Year" from the French Film Academy.
The film describes what it was like to be a political prisoner of the Germans in Paris during WWII. In their efforts to keep down resistance, both the guilty and innocent were arrested, convicted and executed. This is the story of one of those prisoners and his meticulous efforts to find a way to escape, supported and encouraged by his fellow prisoners.
My only complaint is that the horrors of this time were muted by the director. Beatings and executions take place off camera and Germans appear only fleetingly. Perhaps that was because in 1956 the terrors of the Nazi occupation was too recent to dwell on.
Michael W. Perry, editor of Dachau Liberated : The Official Report
Summary of A Man Escaped
"This story is true," reads the opening statement of A Man Escaped. "I give it as it is, without embellishment." Based on the memoir by Andre Devigny, a member of the French Resistance imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Gestapo during the German occupation, Bresson (himself at one time a German POW) transforms Devigny's daring escape into an ascetic film of documentary detail. Kept in a tiny stone cell with a high window and a thick wooden door, the prisoner (renamed Fontaine in the film) makes himself intimate with his world--every surface of his room, every sound reverberating through the hall, and every detail of the prison's layout that he can absorb in brief sojourns from his cell. Bresson magnifies every detail with insistent close-ups and detailed examinations of every step of Fontaine's plan, from constructing and hiding ropes and hooks to painstakingly carving out an exit in the heavy cell door, and provides a sort of Greek chorus of fellow prisoners. This is Bresson's first film to feature a completely nonprofessional cast drilled to master precise movements and deliver lines without dramatic inflection. The effect is a drama where the slightest gesture carries the weight of a confession. Bresson's films are not for everybody, and this austere picture hardly carries the visceral punch of The Great Escape, but it's a drama of profound power, with a gripping climax that's as absorbing and tense as any high-energy action film. --Sean AxmakerArt House & International DVD Video
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