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Michel Legrand, three-time Oscar winner and composer of such classic film songs as “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “I Will Wait for You,” “You Must Believe in Spring” and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?,” along with the groundbreaking musical score for “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” has died. He was 86.

Legrand died at his home early Saturday in Paris, his publicist told Agence France-Presse. His wife, French actress Macha Meril, was at his side.

His most recent film score was “The Other Side of the Wind,” composed for Orson Welles’ last film, which was finally completed and released in 2018. Decades ago, after their 1974 collaboration on “F for Fake,” the legendary director had asked for another Legrand jazz score. “I take it as a gift from Orson, through the clouds,” he said early last year.

The Paris-born Legrand was active in all musical fields, composing classical works, stage musicals,...

Audiences encountering Joshua Henry’s electrifying performance as the charismatic but star-cursed Billy Bigelow will long remember the experience. In this new Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel,” Henry shows off the exceptionally beautiful voice of a genuine actor-singer, a voice that while warm and mellow, can also soar with joy and tremble in despair.

Director Jack O’Brien has given us a conventional production of “Carousel,” in the sense of a show that takes no risks but preserves and protects all the original values of a great American musical. This isn’t obvious at first glance, because Santo Loquasto has designed a breathtaking abstract vision of a carousel — complete with flying horses/dancers — to open the show. But the rest of the musical settles into visual comfort zones for scenes set along the waterfront of the 19th-century New England mill town where the show is set.

Hammerstein...

Fritz Lang continues his take-no-prisoners indictment of America’s curious relationship with crime; this time he presents the thesis that an innocent man can be a pawn in cosmic game of injustice. Three-time loser Henry Fonda, the glummest actor in ’30s films, doesn’t mean to rob or kill, but gosh darn it, They Made Him a Criminal. Those considerations aside, it’s a wonderful cinematic achievement, made all the better by a decent digital restoration.

You Only Live Once

Blu-ray

ClassicFlix

1937 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 86 min. / Street Date July 25, 2017 / 29.98

Starring: Sylvia Sidney, Henry Fonda, Barton MacLane, Jean Dixon,

William Gargan, Jerome Cowan, Charles ‘Chic’ Sale, Margaret Hamilton, Warren Hymer,

Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams, Ward Bond, Jack Carson, Jonathan Hale

Cinematography: Leon Shamroy

Art Direction: Alexander Toluboff

Film Editor: Daniel Mandell

Original Music: Hugo Friedhofer

Written by Graham Baker and Gene Towne

Produced by Walter Wanger

Directed by Fritz Lang...

Wow! Fritz Lang's second western is a marvel -- a combo of matinee innocence and that old Germanic edict that character equals fate. It has a master's sense of color and design. Robert Young is an odd fit but Randolph Scott is nothing less than terrific. You'd think Lang was born on the Pecos. Western Union Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1941 / Color /1:37 flat Academy / 95 min. / Street Date November 8, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Randolph Scott, Robert Young, Virginia Gilmore, Dean Jagger, John Carradine, Chill Wills, Slim Summerville, Barton MacLane, Victor Kilian, George Chandler, Chief John Big Tree, Iron Eyes Cody, Jay Silverheels. Cinematography Edward Cronjager, Allen M. Davey Original Music David Buttolph Written by Robert Carson from the novel by Zane Grey Produced by Harry Joe Brown (associate) Directed by Fritz Lang

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Darryl Zanuck of 20th Fox treated most writers well, was good for John Ford...

Death doesn't take a holiday in this, the granddaddy of movies about the woeful duties of the Grim Reaper. Fritz Lang's heavy-duty Expressionist fable is as German as they get -- a morbid folk tale with an emotionally powerful finish. Destiny Blu-ray Kino Classics 1921 / B&W / 1:33 flat / 98 min. / Street Date August 30, 2016 / Der müde Tod / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Lil Dagover, Walter Janssen, Bernhard Goetzke, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Georg John. Cinematography Bruno Mondi, Erich Nitzschmann, Herrmann Saalfrank, Bruno Timm, Fritz Arno Wagner Film Editor Fritz Lang Written by Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou Produced by Erich Pommer Directed by Fritz Lang

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari takes the prize for the most influential work of early German Expressionism, but coming in a close second is the film in which Fritz Lang first got his act (completely) together, 1921's Destiny (Der müde Tod). A wholly cinematic...

Here's a sterling example of what Hollywood excelled at back in the golden age: Robert Montgomery, Evelyn Keyes, Claude Rains and Edward Everett Horton star in possibly the most magical of movies known as Film Blanc. A cosmic goof leaves a man with fifty years yet to live without a body -- so heavenly troubleshooters try to find him a new one. Here Comes Mr. Jordan Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 819 1941 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 94 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date June 14, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Robert Montgomery, Evelyn Keyes, Claude Rains, Rita Johnson, Edward Everett Horton, James Gleason. Cinematography Joseph Walker Art Direction Lionel Banks Film Editor Viola Lawrence Original Music Frederick Hollander Written by Sidney Buchman, Seton I. Miller from the play Heaven Can Wait by Harry Segall Produced by Everett Riskin Directed by Alexander Hall

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Some movies are so entertaining that it's best to tell people,...

Today in 1954, Carousel opened at City Center, where it ran for 79 performances. Carousel is the second stage musical by the team of Richard Rodgers music and Oscar Hammerstein II book and lyrics. The work premiered in 1945 and was adapted from Ferenc Molnar's 1909 play Liliom, transplanting its Budapest setting to the Maine coastline. The story revolves around carousel barker Billy Bigelow, whose romance with millworker Julie Jordan comes at the price of both their jobs. He attempts a robbery to provide for Julie and their unborn child when it goes wrong, he has a chance to make things right.

Robert Enrico's literally searing terror tale from the French occupation is not for the faint of heart. Fearing reprisals, surgeon Philippe Noiret sends his wife Romy Schneider out of harm's way of the retreating Germans -- but things go horribly wrong. What follows is an ordeal of vengeance even more brutal than Straw Dogs, fought to the finish in a medieval castle. The Old Gun MGM Limited Edition Collection DVD-r 1975 / Color / 1:78 enhanced widescreen / 102 87 min. / Le vieux fusil / Street Date September 8, 2015 / available through Screen Archives Entertainment / 19.95 Starring Philippe Noiret, Romy Schneider, Jean Bouise, Joachim Hansen, Robert Hoffmann, Karl Michael Vogler, Madeleine Ozeray, Caroline Bonhomme, Catherine Delaporte, Daniel Breton, Jean-Paul Cisife, Antoine Saint-John. Cinematography Étienne Becker Film Editor Ava Zora Original Music François de Roubaix Written by Robert Enrico, Pascal Jardin, Claude Veillot Produced by Pierre Caro Directed by Robert Enrico

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Some of us can remember...

Marc Allégret: From André Gide lover to Simone Simon mentor (photo: Marc Allégret) (See previous post: "Simone Simon Remembered: Sex Kitten and Femme Fatale.") Simone Simon became a film star following the international critical and financial success of the 1934 romantic drama Lac aux Dames, directed by her self-appointed mentor – and alleged lover – Marc Allégret.[1] The son of an evangelical missionary, Marc Allégret (born on December 22, 1900, in Basel, Switzerland) was to have become a lawyer. At age 16, his life took a different path as a result of his romantic involvement – and elopement to London – with his mentor and later "adoptive uncle" André Gide (1947 Nobel Prize winner in Literature), more than 30 years his senior and married to Madeleine Rondeaux for more than two decades. In various forms – including a threesome with painter Théo Van Rysselberghe's daughter Elisabeth – the Allégret-Gide relationship remained steady until the late '20s and their trip to...

Film history frequently offers two versions of Fritz Lang: A maker of epic German tragedies and melodramas prior to Nazism’s rise, and a creator of lean, tight Hollywood noir films after leaving Germany in 1933. Yet this division placed within the great Austrian director’s half-century-long film career should be challenged. One reason why is that it overlooks the outliers, such as Lang’s lone film made in France, the splendidly gentle and sad supernatural romance Liliom (1934); his nineteenth-century adventure tale Moonfleet (1955), a CinemaScope work shot on the MGM backlot with an almost entirely British cast; and his final films, realized after he left Hollywood to return to Germany. Another is that it ignores other major binaries and shifts in Lang’s practice.>> - Aaron Cutler...

Film history frequently offers two versions of Fritz Lang: A maker of epic German tragedies and melodramas prior to Nazism’s rise, and a creator of lean, tight Hollywood noir films after leaving Germany in 1933. Yet this division placed within the great Austrian director’s half-century-long film career should be challenged. One reason why is that it overlooks the outliers, such as Lang’s lone film made in France, the splendidly gentle and sad supernatural romance Liliom (1934); his nineteenth-century adventure tale Moonfleet (1955), a CinemaScope work shot on the MGM backlot with an almost entirely British cast; and his final films, realized after he left Hollywood to return to Germany. Another is that it ignores other major binaries and shifts in Lang’s practice.>> - Aaron Cutler...

Today in 1954, Carousel opened at City Center, where it ran for 79 performances. Carousel is the second stage musical by the team of Richard Rodgers music and Oscar Hammerstein II book and lyrics. The work premiered in 1945 and was adapted from Ferenc Molnar's 1909 play Liliom, transplanting its Budapest setting to the Maine coastline. The story revolves around carousel barker Billy Bigelow, whose romance with millworker Julie Jordan comes at the price of both their jobs. He attempts a robbery to provide for Julie and their unborn child when it goes wrong, he has a chance to make things right.

Today in 1954, Carousel opened at City Center, where it ran for 79 performances. Carousel is the second stage musical by the team of Richard Rodgers music and Oscar Hammerstein II book and lyrics. The work premiered in 1945 and was adapted from Ferenc Molnar's 1909 play Liliom, transplanting its Budapest setting to the Maine coastline. The story revolves around carousel barker Billy Bigelow, whose romance with millworker Julie Jordan comes at the price of both their jobs. He attempts a robbery to provide for Julie and their unborn child when it goes wrong, he has a chance to make things right.

The new movie from the director of Blue Valentine is a modern morality tale underpinned by outstanding central performances

Brother Tied, the first film by Derek Cianfrance, now aged 39, was made 15 years ago and apparently remains in some legal limbo, unreleased and unseen. His second film, Blue Valentine, released in 2010, attracted considerable attention for the outstanding performances of Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as respectively a blue-collar worker and the middle-class medical student who gives up her studies to marry him. The movie traces their seven-year marriage achronologically, starting with its final collapse. But unlike Harold Pinter's Betrayal, which moves steadily back in time from bitter dissolution to propitious beginning, Blue Valentine hops around over the years as the couple reflect on their lives.

Cianfrance's ambitious new film, The Place Beyond the Pines, has a straight linear movement that sprawls and at times crawls over some 17 years. It's a...

Like Night of the Hunter, Tod Browning’s Freaks or Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers, The Road to Yesterday can be ranked among the UFOs of cinema. It’s place in the heart of Cecil B. DeMille’s work proves to be in itself very distinctive. We know that, during his entire life, DeMille had virtually only one producer—Paramount (the former Famous Players Lasky)—just like Minnelli was MGM’s man and Corman American International’s. Sixty-three of his films (out of seventy) were produced at Paramount. And, oddly enough, it is among the seven outsiders, situated within a brief period from 1925 to 1931, that his best activity is to be found (I’m thinking of Madam Satan, The Godless Girl, and The Road to Yesterday)–his most audacious undertakings. To top it off, for this uncontested king of the box office, his best films were his biggest commercial failures.

Le bonheur (1934) may be Marcel L'Herbier's best talkie—even if it is, its existence should be enough to disprove the widely and uncritically accepted assumption that the director went into a steep decline with the coming of sound.

In fact, the bigger problem is that not enough people know his work at all. In the silent era, he quite deliberately competed with Abel Gance in terms of cinematic spectacle, swinging his camera from ropes and wheeling it on a lighting stand, while also pursuing a cinema of elaborate, stylized production design. There's something inscrutable about him: he shuttles from genre trifles to experimental epics, and his true sensibility may be glimpsed as much in the former as the latter. Perhaps his homosexuality, an open secret in the film business, led him to to employ layers of careful coding more than most commercial filmmakers.

L'Herbier's early talkies include the lighter-than-air...

The first item that needs mentioning is Sight & Sound's followup to last week's tweets and sneak peeks, "2011 in review: The full poll," 101 critics and curators listing their top five films and generally reflecting on the year that was. Editor Nick James introduces the bundle.

The second order of business would be the obligatory mention of David Fincher's commenting on the David Denby vs Scott Rudin brouhaha (briefly: the New Yorker critic reneged on his promise not to run a review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before the embargo would be lifted on December 13; the producer blew his top). Talking to Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald, Fincher naturally comes down on the side of his producer, but also adds: "Embargoes… look, if it were up to me, I wouldn't show movies to anybody before they were released…. But by the same token, when you agree to go...