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French Can-Can

French Cancan
Frenchcancan poster.jpg
Theatrical release poster
Directed by Jean Renoir
Produced by Louis Wipf
Written by Jean Renoir
André-Paul Antoine
Starring Jean Gabin
Françoise Arnoul
María Félix
Music by Georges Van Parys
Cinematography Michel Kelber
Edited by Borys Lewin
Distributed by Gaumont Film Company
Criterion Collection
Release date
9 April 1955
Running time
104 minutes
Country France
Italy
Language French
Box office 4,075,306 admissions (France)

French Cancan is a 1955 French musical film written and directed by Jean Renoir and starring Jean Gabin and Francoise Arnoul. Where Renoir’s previous film Le Carosse d’or had celebrated the 18th-century Italian commedia dell’arte, this work is a homage to the Parisian café-concert of the 19th century with its popular singers and dancers. Visually, the film evokes the paintings of Edgar Degas and the Impressionists, including his own father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It also marked his return to France and to French cinema after an exile that began in 1940.

Set in 1890s Paris, Henri Danglard is the owner of a cafe, which features his mistress, Lola, as a belly dancer. Losing money, Henri finds himself in Montmartre and finds that the old-fashioned can-can is still being performed there. Inspired, Henri comes up with a new business scheme that aims to revive the can-can, featuring a new dancer, Nini, a laundress he meets by chance.

François Truffaut reviewed the film in Arts magazine in May 1955 and called it a milestone in the history of colour of cinema. "Every scene is a cartoon in movement [-] Madame Guibole's dance class reminds us of a Degas sketch." Whilst Truffaut did not consider it as important a film as Rules of the Game or The Golden Coach, he nevertheless praised it as an example of Renoir "as vigorous and youthful as ever." This affirmative response was not shared by Bernard Chardère however, writing in Positif, who criticised the music, the sets, even the final cancan scene. "The phoniness of the rue Lepic, with its vegetable carts and piles of artificial stones is painful to look at. The actors act. The audience gets bored. The dance rehearsals are Degas all right, but the kind that appears on Post Office calendars."


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