One of the all-time comedy classics, René Clair’s À nous la liberté tells the story of Louis, an escaped convict who becomes a wealthy industrialist. Unfortunately, his past returns (in the form of old jail pal Emile) to upset his carefully laid plans. Featuring lighthearted wit, tremendous visual innovation, and masterful manipulation of sound, À nous la liberté is both a potent indictment of mechanized modern society and an uproarious comic delight. —The Criterion Collection
In 1920 René-Lucien Chomette began acting in films under the name René Clair. He performed in Louis Feuillade’s 1921 serials L’Orpheline and Parisette, but in 1924 he began writing and directing his own films with the comic fantasy Paris Qui Dort (The Crazy Ray). Through the ‘20s Clair would make some of the most original and admired works of early French cinema, including the avant-garde short Entr’acte, the landmark early musicals Sous Les Toits De Paris and Le Million, and the classic satire A Nous La Liberté. Working in England and the United States during the 1930s and ’40s, his films were dominated (sometimes overly so) by fantasy and whimsy, but he managed to inject some healthy venom into the Agatha Christie mystery And Then There Were None. He returned to Europe for his films of the 1950s and ’60s, most notably La Beauté Du Diable (Beauty And The Devil) and Les Belles De Nuit (Beauties Of The Night).
—allmovie guide
Most early sound films were static and unimaginative but in the same year that Lang directed M in Germany and was being innovative with sound and music, Clair was achieving a similar success in France. Influenced by American slapstick comedy - particularly Laurel and Hardy - and covering similar ground to Chaplin's later Modern Times, this satire on the industrial age still delights 80 years after its first release..
Tracing Bresson’s audio-visual sensibility back to the formally-ambitious film comedies of the early 1930s.
This restless phantasmagoria is fond, melancholy and not quite serene.
Renè Clair’s À nous la Liberté got most of its initial attention in the States in 1936 when Tobis, the French studio that produced the film, sued Charlie Chaplin alleging plagiarism in his Modern Times… read review
