Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

evening1 What would it be like to have one's rural French town controlled by Nazi collaborators? Director Louis Malle masterfully conjures the sense of vulnerability that would result if "la milise francaise" had commandeered the nicest hotel in town and used it for torture, dances, executions, and sex.I have read that Malle wanted a non-actor to play the lead here, and he auditioned 1,000 young men before choosing Pierre Blaise as Lucien. The baby-faced teenager is a natural for a part that calls on him to be blithely cold, manipulative, cruel, and absolutely vacuous when it comes to having a soul.I was filled with apprehension through much of this deeply disturbing film. Malle is able to induce trepidation in the viewer as one wonders, with dread, what Lucien will do next. A scene in which he accosts a bound-up torture victim who has been left in a room is practically unbearable to sit through. The depth of Lacombe's depravity is stunning.Yet Lucien has stumbled into his position somewhat accidentally, after abandoning a position as a janitor at a nursing home. Lacombe is the type of person who will kill a songbird just because it's there, or poach more rabbits than anyone can eat just because he's a good shot.It's little wonder that this cipher of a human being seeks out the milise when local Resistance fighters reject him as too young. His mother, who has had to make her own grave compromises because of the war, worries about Lucien, and who could blame her? When she warns Lucien that he'll eventually be shot for his deeds, he shrugs it off, telling her he likes it where he is, and stuffs a few francs into her purse.In this at least partly based-on-truth story, Lacombe eventually gets his comeuppance. How tragic (according to Wikipedia) that Blaise, only a year after the movie came out, lost his life as well -- crashing the Renault he'd bought with wages earned from the film.A truly astonishing work.

Milan One of the top 3 films of Louis Malle, Lacombe Lucien, named in bureaucratic fashion is a film of many layers. Perfectly cast and done with precision and minuscule eye for the period detail, this picture is like all of Malle's best work, an aesthetic picture novel. Malle did his best in casting Pierre Blaise as a main character, showing with an emotionless face the deepness of the void in his soul. Sadistic and cruel, murdering small animals and decapitating chicken with ease, Lucien is a text book example of the deviant character without any moral scruples, left out of his mother's emotional care and show of love. He wanders in a moral wasteland of his life and ends up just where he is supposed to be, a French Gestapo unit, Lucien joins not only in a wrong place, but at the wrongest of times to be serving the German Nazi regime (June 1944). It's a motley crew full of shady characters, racists, bigots, one of which is even black and politest of them all, former actresses in insignificant films, and a dog, all of them some sort of has-beens trying to do harm to the world they're also left out of.Lucien knows no love, no compassion, no human emotion, and it shows perfectly on his face, not until he meats a Jewish girl, called France (of all names),the daughter of Albert the tailor who survives the madness of the war doing his job for everybody even the collaborationist that is out to get him. He is aware of his guilt and willingly pays for it. Lucien finds out about love, but in the process he also learns about human emotions and even manages in one brief moment to separate right from wrong. Too little to late, as it shows, but the point Malle wanted to make in this movie is right on the spot. Humanity is a strange beast. Fantastic.

secondtake Lacombe, Lucien (1974)A disturbing and sad movie about surviving the Nazi occupation in France. It's unlike any other film of its type, turning from tender to ruthless in a breath, and from joyous to ghastly just as fast. And though the Nazis are behind the violence and fear, they play a mostly indirect role in the cornering of a small Jewish family in the countryside. This is a tale about French and French, about the Resistance against collaborators.And it's told from the point of view of the collaborators, a gang of opportunistic thugs who have taken over an old hotel and who terrorize, with German supplied documents, ordinary citizens. The title character is Lucien, an utterly heartless but somehow, at times, sympathetic boy who gets pulled into the lure of these thugs. But he shows a scary detachment from all feeling, even from love at first, and certainly from respect for life. There is a hint that he grew to think human life was cheap from his days hunting and killing animals without a flinch as a youth, but it could be the movie is showing that he had almost a disorder, something that made him unfeeling even for the most ordinary, harmless, vulnerable things. I think the former is more accurate, though, because his hunting rabbits and killing a chicken with his hands were probably (and still are) part of country life where rabbit and chicken were part of the cuisine.But it's people who will eventually be his target, and he is not like his older counterparts. He doesn't want the spoils of war, not money or finery, resisting at first even the suit the Jewish tailor is ordered to make for him. It is here the movie gets to what matters. Lucien is ignorant enough to not quite see why this Jewish man is any different than other men, but he catches on when others around him make clear the Jew is only alive and in hiding as their choice. I guess they need a good tailor, and they need the man's money (the tailor pays when he makes the suits, it seems). The complication of a beautiful (and very French looking) daughter takes some of the expected turns, but not completely, because this very young man doesn't really know how to behave, or how to fall in love.The director, Louis Malle, is a legend of French cinema, and later even of American cinema. He depends on location shooting, natural light, and naturalistic acting to give every scene a believability that is both beautiful and at times uncanny, especially combined with violence to animals. The lead actor, Pierre Blase, is almost too convincing in his cool and relatively mindless determination. The tailor, played by Holger Löwenadler, a Swedish actor, is a model of patience and continual assessment, trying to play the game with the thugs for his survival. His daughter is less fully realized, with Aurore Clement playing this charming and innocent girl withheld from normal life by the war. But she does in fact learn to love Lucien in her own way, and he responds in his own way.Needless to say, the end is tragic and rather perfect. And the whole troubling two hours getting there will leave you moved, for sure, but also enlightened. The problem of loyalty and survival takes on new light here.

Ilpo Hirvonen Louis Malle earned three Oscar nominations during his career and Lacombe Lucien was a nominee for the Best Foreign Language film. But somehow Malle and his films have remained quite unknown. The destruction of innocence and the influence of war on youth were common themes for him; alongside with Goodbye, Children (1983), Lacombe Lucien is to my mind one of his finest films and one of the finest anti-war films made; but there's much more to it than just that.In 1944 during WWII an 18-year-old Lucien Lacombe wishes to join the resistance in France. After getting turned down he starts working for the German police. He enjoys his small does of power and authority but things start to get complicated when he gets infatuated by a girl, who is a daughter of a Jewish tailor. After a series of misfortunes Lucien tries to save the girl by escaping to the countryside. When Americans come to France they sentence Lucien to death for working for the Nazis.Louis Malle often tested the audiences he pushed the limitations of cinematic expression. The Lovers (1958) was a description of a woman bored with her bourgeois life and it quite courageously showed sexuality on screen, which got the film banned in many countries and for instance; an American distributor called it pornography and denied to distribute it. Murmur of the Heart (1971) was a bold film about sexual awakening which portrayed an incest relationship between a mother and her teenage son. Lacombe Lucien was also a brave film with regards to WWII and Nazis, who are often seen as soulless monsters in films. Discussing about the controversy of the trial of Nurnberg was quite a taboo in 1970's - and still is; Nazis committed a crime against humanity, but the Allies weren't saints either but Germans remained the only ones culpable. It's quite hard to have sympathy for Nazis and Louis Malle doesn't ask for it, but what he does is show the flip side of the truth: portraying a youngster who doesn't know on whose side he actually is and in the end gets sentenced to death.The film is also a film of strong contrasts: it starts with a sequence in the countryside, beautiful landscapes and sounds of locusts - a place where Lucien is at his most juvenile. Then we're thrown to the city, narrow alleys and gray buildings where Lucien works for the German police and tries hardly to be at his most mature. The countryside represents peace, adolescence and innocence on the contrary the city represents war and adulthood. In the countryside the violence is towards animals and in the city it is towards Jews. In the end when we are taken back to the countryside the viewer is given the last clue about Lucien's naivety and ignorance when he plays around with the girl.Lacombe Lucien is also a portrayal of the destruction of innocence and how war influences youth; people who are still searching themselves and have no idea about life - they're easy to exploit. It's a film about the evil in us all, it's a growth story. The severe aesthetics and the subtle narrative worked very well and Louis Malle's decision of giving sympathy for Lucien in the end fascinated film. A brilliant film against war, everything that takes innocence away from the youth, a story about the influence war has on us and how power and naivety should never be mixed.