Under the Roofs of Paris

Under the Roofs of Paris (1930)

Sous les toits de Paris

In the tenement slums of Paris between the world wars, impoverished street singer Albert yearns for beautiful Romanian immigrant Pola. Pola's boyfriend, local hoodlum Fred, grows jealous of Albert's constant attention to his woman and frames the hapless musician for one of his own petty crimes. But while Albert is in prison for Fred's misdeed, Pola ends up falling for Albert's faithful best friend, Louis.

Date of release
1930-04-28
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (68)
Runtime
1h 32m
Genres
Drama, Romance
Director
René Clair

Casting

Interesting facts

Under the Roofs of Paris is a 1930 French film directed by René Clair. The film was probably the earliest French example of a filmed musical-comedy, although its often dark tone differentiates it from other instances of the genre. It was the first French production of the sound film era to achieve great international success.

Production

René Clair filmed Sous les toits de Paris at Épinay between 2 January and 21 March 1930. The setting of the film was defined by the elaborately realistic yet evocative set which Lazare Meerson devised to depict a street of Parisian tenements, populated by familiar archetypes of 'ordinary life': the young newly-weds, the pickpocket, the street singer.

Among the other members of Clair's team on the film were Georges Lacombe as assistant director and Marcel Carné handling script continuity ("secrétaire de plateau"). During the last weeks of filming, the art director Lazare Meerson hired a 23-year-old Hungarian as a replacement in his team, Alexandre Trauner, who went on to work as designer on many major French films of the following decades.

When the film first came out, it began with a five-minute sequence outlining the relationships of the main characters, before the spectacular travelling shot that descends from the rooftops. In later versions this introduction disappeared, perhaps reflecting Clair's second thoughts, and the symmetry of the film's beginning and end was allowed to stand out.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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