Atlantic Wall

Le Mur de l'Atlantique

France, Italy

1970

135 Min

Color

French, English, German

Currently 2.0/5 Stars.
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SCR Marcel Camus, Marcel Jullian

CAST Bourvil, Peter McEnery, Sophie Desmarets, Jean Poiret, Sara Franchetti, Reinhard Kolldehoff, Pino Caruso, Terry-Thomas, William Mervyn, Jess Hahn, Roland Lesaffre

ED Andrée Camuseix, Andrée Feix

PROD DES Pierre Guffroy, Albert Rajau

Despite the Nazi occupation, Norman restaurant-owner Léon Duchemin (Bourvil) lives peaceably with his sister (Sophie Desmarets) and his daughter (Sara Franchetti) until the day when the dramatic arrival of an English parachutist (Peter McEnery) not only throws his life into disarray, but forces him to take his first steps into the Resistance alongside Armand (Jean Poiret). And, with Field-Marshal Rommel and a love story also in play, Léon Duchemin’s adventures don’t end there. —SNC/ Warner Home Movies

Director

Marcel Camus

French motion-picture director who won international acclaim for his second film, Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) in 1958. The film was praised for its use of exotic settings and brilliant spectacle and won first prize at both the Cannes and Venice film festivals as well as an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Camus, educated as an art teacher, spent most of World War II as a prisoner of war, after which he entered the film industry as an assistant and technical adviser to directors Jacques Feyder and Luis Buñuel and others.

Morte en fraude (1956; Fugitive in Saigon, 1957), Camus’s first feature film, was a protest against the war in Indochina and received little attention. Later films—such as L’Oiseau de paradis (1961; Dragon Sky, 1964), Le Chant du monde (1965; “The Song of the World”), and Otalia de Bahia (1976)—also failed to attract the interest of critics and the public in the way that Orfeu Negro had. — Encyclopædia Britannica read more