Conférence du 19 février 2026 sur Maurice Tourneur à la Cinémathèque française

La conférence sur Maurice Tourneur que j'ai donnée à la Cinémathèque française le 19 février dernier est maintenant disponible en ligne: ici.

Review of 'Maurice Tourneur - Weaver of Dreams' in Shepherd Express on May 12, 2026

 

A new review by David Luhrssen in Shepherd Express on May 12, 2026:

No, the new biography is not about Jacques Tourneur—it’s on his father, Maurice. As the director of beloved psychological horror films such as Cat People (1942) and Night of the Demon (1957), as well as the film noir classic Out of the Past (1947), Jacques has left a deep impression on American cinephiles. However, his less-remembered father, Maurice, is also worthy of a deep look. He was a pioneer of French cinema in the decade after Georges Méliès, and in the filmography compiled in the new biography by Christine Leteux, nearly 100 movies are listed from a work life spanning 1913 through 1948.

In Maurice Tourneur: Weaver of Dreams, Leteux follows the director through his life. Born Maurice Thomas, he changed his name to Tourneur (after a shop sign he passed on the road) because “Thomas” was slang for “chamber pot.” Not a good name for someone who wanted to be on stage—he was a thespian who picked up a few francs moonlighting in movies. He viewed the new medium with skepticism, but “slowly he caught the movie bug” Leteux writes. Before long he was directing films, most of them lost or preserved in fragments.

Before World War I, France was a leader in world cinema, its studios operating branches in Fort Lee, NJ, America’s unlikely movie capital before the advent of Hollywood. In spring 1914, Maurice was sent by his studio, Éclair, to Fort Lee, arriving on these shores less than fluent in English but driven by determination.

When war broke out in August 1914, he ignored his draft notice and sent instead for his family, including 10-year-old Jacques, who joined him after a dangerous Atlantic crossing. Surviving films from the period display his command of the rapidly evolving silent medium. He moved to Los Angeles in 1920 and enjoyed his biggest hit that year, The Last of the Mohicans. Leteux calls it “a pantheistic ode to an America before the arrival of settlers.” Arguing with MGM (the details are sketchy), he returned to France with an American passport and evaded questions about what he didn’t do during the war. He escaped punishment, pleading his contributions to “the cause of the French film industry,” but a “suspension order” hung over his head. He faced the possibility of being deported back to the U.S.

What Maurice did or didn’t do during the next war because another topic of controversy. After France fell to the Nazis, he directed for Continental Films, a German-controlled studio. Sifting carefully through wartime archives with the same diligence she applies to his entire career, Leteux finds that Maurice enjoyed no special favors—the Germans even stole his car!—and was left with few choices. She discovers no trace of antisemitism in his personal correspondence and little taste for toadying to the new regime.

After the liberation of France, Tourneur was cleared to resume working in film but made few movies in the changing postwar climate. He worked for several years translating American hardboiled crime fiction for a French publisher and was largely forgotten by the time of his death in 1961. With Weaver of Dreams, Leteux restores him to his place in the story of 20th century film.

Maurice Tourneur: Weaver of Dreams is published by University of Wisconsin Press.

Critique de 'Maurice Tourneur - Réalisateur sans frontières' dans Jeune Cinéma de mai 2026

 

Une nouvelle critique signée Alexis Leroy publiée dans la revue Jeune Cinéma N°443 de mai 2026

Christine Leteux nous propose non seulement une redécouverte majestueuse du parcours exceptionnel d'un artiste, mais aussi une histoire du cinéma à l'intérieur des cinq premières décennies de son existence. Cet ouvrage débute comme un film d'espionnage, et se conclut par une image mystique, ainsi que par une allusion à un couple du XIIIe siècle dont les amours douloureuses devinrent littérature. [...] Une trajectoire que l'auteure retrace avec ferveur, au fil des sources, des longs métrages et des personnes qu'elle décrit en un style dynamique et sensible, sans omettre l'objectivité nécessaire et inhérente à son travail d'enquêtrice d'un cinéma parfois perdu. [...] Un vibrant et foisonnant éclairage-hommage que Christine Leteux nous transmet avec un art subtil et délicat, mais engagé.

Critique de "Maurice Tourneur - Réalisateur sans frontières" dans TRANSFUGE de mai 2026

 

Une nouvelle critique publiée dans le magazine TRANSFUGE de mai 2026 sous la plume de Sophie Pujas. Petit extrait:

Maurice Tourneur, du muet à la France occupée

L'historienne Christine Leteux livre la passionnante biographie d'un cinéaste virtuose dont l'histoire croise les tumultes du XXe siècle. Dans la famille Tourneur, la gloire du fils - Jacques, le réalisateur de La Féline - a parfois occulté celle du père, Maurice. L'historienne du cinéma Christine Leteux lui rend justice à travers une captivante biographie. Le livre est le fruit d'un minutieux travail d'archives, dont certaines, au destin rocambolesque, furent emportées en Allemagne par l'occupant nazi, puis saisies par les Soviétiques et transportées en URSS à la fin de la guerre. Elle dresse le portrait d'un homme insaisissable, peu enclin à partager ses émotions. [...] Il est pourtant fascinant. Car à travers lui, Christine Leteux raconte la naissance de l'industrie du cinéma, des bouillonnements du cinéma muet à l'émergence d'Hollywood - mais aussi l'histoire du premier XXe siècle et le tumulte des deux guerres mondiales.[...] Un livre qui donne une furieuse envie de se replonger dans la folle inventivité des premiers temps du cinéma.

Review of 'Maurice Tourneur - Weaver of Dreams' in Midwest Book Review

 

This is the first review in Midwest Book Review of my biography of Maurice Tourneur released 

on April 7:

Critique: An exceptional, seminal, and groundbreaking study of extensive research and meticulously documented scholarship, "Maurice Tourneur: Weaver of Dreams" by Christine Leteux is informatively enhanced for the reader's benefit with the inclusion of a Foreword by Robert Byrne, numerous B/W illustrations, a two page Introduction, a two page listing of Acknowledgments, twenty pages of Notes, an eighteen page Filmography, a two page Selected Bibliography, and a twelve page Index. This hardcover edition of "Maurice Tourneur: Weaver of Dreams" from the Wisconsin University Press is a unique and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, professional, community, and college/university library Film/Movie History/Criticism collections and supplemental Cinematic History/Biography curriculum studies lists.

Critique "Maurice Tourneur - Réalisateur sans frontières" dans 'La Marseillaise'

 

Une superbe critique parue dans La Marseillaise le 5 avril 2026:

Voyage dans 4 décennies d’histoire du cinéma

Christine Leteux retrace la destinée hors du commun d’un réalisateur « sans frontières » qui influença aussi bien Fritz Lang que Josef Von Sternberg.

À notre grande honte, nous devons admettre que nous ignorions l’existence de Maurice Tourneur (1876-1961), avant que le facteur ne sonne à notre porte pour nous distribuer une enveloppe dans laquelle se trouvait un livre, sur la jaquette duquel un mystérieux monsieur, au regard doux et charmeur, nous invitait à faire sa connaissance. Bien nous en a pris d’aller directement à la table des matières, car, grâce à elle, nous sûmes qu’il nous était impossible de passer sous silence la biographie d’un cinéaste qui connut le muet, l’avènement du parlant, qui travailla aux États-Unis, revint en France, dirigea nos plus grandes vedettes, dont Fernandel, Louis Jouvet, Jean Gabin, Fernand Ledoux, Danielle Darrieux, et se mit à la traduction de romans policiers après avoir été amputé d’une jambe, suite à un accident de voiture.

Une intense réalité

La honte passée, elle nous revint lorsque nous apprîmes que Tourneur était le réalisateur de Volpone, sorti avant notre naissance, et interprété par Harry Baur, inoubliable dans sa recherche obstinée d’une diabolique vengeance. Preuve sans doute que la jeunesse s’intéresse, ou s’intéressait, davantage aux acteurs (surtout lorsqu’il y en a toute une pléiade) qu’au metteur en scène, au dialoguiste, ou à l’accessoiriste. Il nous aura donc fallu attendre Christine Leteux, couronnée par l’Institut Lumière, pour le savoir. Mais n’est-ce pas le rôle des ouvrages, fortement documentés, de combler nos lacunes cinématographiques ? Ce qui communique à cette biographie une réalité si intense, c’est que les moindres détails sont évoqués et décrits avec une rigoureuse précision. Chapeau bas à l’auteur ! Reste à espérer qu’un héritier de Miloš Forman, ou une héritière de Julie Taymor, en fasse un biopic.

Maurice Tourneur - Weaver of Dreams on April 7, 2026 from University of Wisconsin Press

 

My own translation of my biography Maurice Tourneur - Weaver of Dreams is coming out soon from University of Wisconsin Press on April 7. You can already pre-order it from the publisher.

Conférence Maurice Tourneur le 25 mars 2026 à l'Institut Lumière à Lyon

 

Je présenterai une conférence sur Maurice Tourneur mercredi 25 mars 2026 à 18h30 à la Villa Lumière à Lyon. Cette conférence sera suivie d'une séance de dédicace et d'une projection de

JUSTIN DE MARSEILLE (1935) à 20h.

Vous pouvez réservez vos places ici.

Maurice Tourneur - Réalisateur sans frontières - Nouvelle édition augmentée 2026 chez Institut Lumière - Actes Sud

 

Ma biographie de Maurice Tourneur a été rééditée le 4 février 2026 par Institut Lumière - Actes Sud. 

Une première critique a paru dans Les Cahiers du cinéma de mars 2026 sous la plume de Fernando Ganzo:

L'ouvrage de Christine Leteux, Maurice Tourneur, réalisateur sans frontières, qu'Actes Sud vient de rééditer, réussit à transmettre un enthousiasme de la recherche, un goût de l'archive, une fascination pour la découverte des vies qui ont fait le cinéma muet et en particulier celle, très romanesque, de Maurice Tourneur. Mais surtout, il recompose comme un puzzle, à coups de citations et de documents d'époque, une filmographie à trous, appelant les critiques à une certaine modestie : il est impossible de penser le cinéma muet sans ce travail d'enquête qui met les mots là où les images manquent.

Et Laurent Delmas a chroniqué le livre samedi 14 mars sur France Inter: 

Qui est donc l’acteur français que l’on entend dans ce film de 1942 ?
C’est la voix inimitable de Pierre Fresnay dans le film LA MAIN DU DIABLE de Maurice Tourneur. Ce nom ne vous dit peut-être pas grand-chose, Maurice Tourneur, car une fois n’est pas coutume dans la famille des cinéaste, Tourneur le fils, Jacques, parce qu’il a réalisé notamment LA FÉLINE, est plus connu que le père, Maurice. Et c’est une injustice à laquelle Christine Leteux vient de s’attaquer dans sa très complète biographie qui vient tout juste de paraître aux éditions Institut Lumière – Actes Sud, et qui s’intitule « Maurice Tourneur – Réalisateur sans frontières ».
De fait, Tourneur a réalisé son premier film en France en 1913 et c’était une adaptation du MYSTERE DE LA CHAMBRE JAUNE. Mais, 15 films et 2 ans plus tard, il migre aux États-Unis où, dans la lignée d’un Griffith et d’un DeMille, il tourne une cinquantaine de films jusqu’en 1928, où il revient en France pour le passage au parlant et réalise alors 24 films, dont le dernier en 1948, avant de s’éteindre, presque complètement oublié, le 4 août 1961, à l’âge de 85 ans.
Étrange destinée professionnelle, alors même que sa filmographie durant les années 40 compte quelques pépites, comme cette MAIN DU DIABLE, dont on a entendu un extrait, un film du genre fantastique comme on ne sait plus les faire en France. Sous l’occupation, Maurice Tourneur travaille pour la Continental, la société de production sous contrôle allemand. Cinq productions au total, où il fait tourner Jouvet dans VOLPONE [Edit: ce n’est pas une production Continental] et Albert Préjean en Maigret dans CÉCILE EST MORTE, entre autres films, toujours dignes d’intérêt, sans qu’on puisse parler pour autant de collaboration politique. Tourneur ne sera d’ailleurs pas réellement inquiété à la Libération, contrairement à Clouzot ou Decoin, par exemple.
Je n’ai pas le temps de vous détailler sa vie, souvent mouvementée, mais cette biographie hautement recommandable et qui fait date se lit comme un roman grâce à l’impressionnant travail de recherche mené par Christine Leteux. Allez, on se quitte avec la musique d’un film de Tourneur déjà cité, l’excellent CÉCILE EST MORTE, adapté de Simenon avec une musique originale de Roger Dumas. Maurice Tourneur par Christine Leteux, c’est chez Institut Lumière – Actes Sud.

Conférence sur ALBERT CAPELLANI le 31 mai à 17h à la Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé

 Je présenterai une conférence sur Albert Capellani le vendredi 31 mai à 17h 

à la Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé

73 av. des Gobelins, Paris 13e

(M° Place d'Italie)

Vous pouvez vous inscrire sur le lien ci-dessous.

Projection MAURICE TOURNEUR - TISSEUR DE REVES le 28 mai à 19h30

 Notre documentaire sur Maurice Tourneur sera projeté au 

Cinéma des Cinéastes (7 av. de Clichy, Paris 17e)

M°: Place de Clichy

le mardi 28 mai à 19h30

Venez découvrir ce grand pionnier franco-américain du cinéma !

Projection MAURICE TOURNEUR - TISSEUR DE REVES samedi 10 février 2024

 Venez découvrir en avant-première 

notre documentaire sur le cinéaste franco-américain Maurice Tourneur à

La Filmothèque du Quartier Latin

9 rue Champollion, Paris 5e

Samedi 10 février 2024 à 13h40

Je serai là pour le présenter avec le réalisateur Pierre Filmon. Et le documentaire sera suivi du film de Maurice Tourneur, AVEC LE SOURIRE (1936) avec Maurice Chevalier.

Conférence Maurice Tourneur le 17 novembre 2023 à 19h

 

Vous pouvez vous inscrire pour assister à la conférence à la Bibliothèque Brassens

38 rue Gassendi, 75014 Paris (M° Denfert-Rochereau).

9e "Prix Raymond Chirat" au Festival Lumière le 18 octobre 2023

 Je suis heureuse de vous annoncer que j'ai reçu le "Prix Raymond Chirat" qui récompense un écrivain-historien-chercheur en histoire du cinéma lors du Festival Lumière à Lyon le 18 octobre 2023. Un grand merci à Thierry Frémaux et à l'Institut Lumière.

Continental Films reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement

A new review for my Continental Films book in the Times Literary Supplement:

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/continental-films-christine-leteux-book-review-ginette-vincendeau/

Director’s cut

The compromises of a French studio during the Nazi occupation

By Ginette Vincendeau (Times Literary Supplement, June 2, 2023)

Sitting at the terrace of the upscale Fouquet’s bar-restaurant on the Champs-Elysées in the autumn of 1940, the young actor Paul Meurisse (then Edith Piaf’s lover) nearly burst into tears at the sight of German soldiers parading down the famous avenue. “We were defeated”, he said, “but at that precise moment, we understood that humiliation escorted defeat.”

By contrast, the film mogul Alfred Greven – head of the powerful German company Continental, whose offices were situated across from Fouquet’s – loved the daily parade as much as he enjoyed lording it over French cinema, creaming off the best of its available talent (including Meurisse). During meetings he would invite his French employees to step out to the balcony to admire the military display. On one occasion this proved too much for the film-maker Henri Decoin, who left. When asked sarcastically by Greven’s right-hand man, Rudolf Hans Bauermeister, if music wasn’t his thing, Decoin replied: “I like music, especially when it’s played by French soldiers”.

These are a couple of the many stories recounted in Christine Leteux’s captivating book (translated from the French original published in 2017) that pointedly reflect the heartache, compromises and paradoxes of the period. In Continental Films: French cinema under German control, Leteux offers the first book-length study of Continental Films, its enigmatic director, Greven, the film personnel that he hired (and fired) and the films he produced, encompassing run-of-the-mill entertainment as well as masterpieces such as Decoin’s Les Inconnus dans la maison (1942), which provides the cover picture, and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943).

The German occupation of France during the Second World War holds a seemingly unending fascination for historians, journalists, biographers and the public at large, as does the cinema of the era. In France especially, many books and articles have been written about the 220 films made during those years, often referred to as a “golden age” during which French cinema could flourish in the absence of American films. In those accounts mention is always made of the thirty features and eighteen documentary shorts produced by the Nazi-controlled Continental. Headed by Greven in Paris, Continental answered to Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry in Berlin. If the topic is familiar, Leteux succeeds in making it fresh, not just by focusing on Continental, but through painstaking research in French and German archives. In particular she pored over the mass of transcripts of the épuration (“purge”) trials held at the liberation to hold to account those who had continued to work in the industry during the war – that is, practically everyone. This makes for reading that is in turn poignant, absurd and frequently shocking.

The cinema of the occupation, whether made at Continental or not, has long been called a “cinema of paradox” (the title of Evelyn Ehrlich’s book on the same subject, published in 1985). In a monumental study of 1989, [i]Le Cinéma français sous l’occupation[/i], the French historian Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit documents this at the level of the film industry as a whole. By concentrating on Continental and delving deep into its notorious history, Leteux shows that a “cinema of compromise” might be a better title. And how could it be otherwise? In a profoundly divided country – Germans vs French; resisters vs collaborators; Jews vs antisemites; a privileged elite vs a starving population – people had to get on with each other if they wanted to work. Between the minority of heroic and monstrous extremes, most French men and women struggled messily to survive, including in the film industry. One of the merits of Leteux’s book is to deepen this picture by detailing the extraordinary degree of manoeuvring, double speak and pressure exercised by the occupying forces and, in some cases, the depths of depravity plumbed by some individuals, French or German. Two such episodes provide fascinating, if at times harrowing, passages in the book.

Chapter eleven, “A trip to Berlin”, revisits a well-known propaganda exercise in which, in March 1942, film personnel (many from Continental) made a trip to Berlin, Vienna and Munich at the invitation of Carl Froelich, the head of the Third Reich Film Office. Among them were Danielle Darrieux, the leading female star of the time, the actresses Suzy Delair, Junie Astor and Viviane Romance, and the actor Albert Préjean. The much-photographed episode, beginning with radiant actresses in mink coats boarding the train to Berlin, has become, as Leteux puts it, a “symbol of artistic collaboration during the German occupation”; indeed, those involved, not least Darrieux, are still routinely condemned for it. But Leteux demonstrates that while Delair, for instance, enthusiastically embraced the project, others only acquiesced under German pressure akin to blackmail. The screenwriter André Legrand, who had written an anti-Nazi volume in 1940, was made an offer he couldn’t refuse: he had to go or be made destitute. Romance was threatened with an investigation into her allegedly Jewish Polish grand-mother. Darrieux, who had more clout, made the trip on the condition that she could visit her fiancé, the diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa, held in a German internment camp.

The Harry Baur case (chapter twelve) is truly horrifying. Baur was then a star of stage and screen, and as such, like Darrieux, a real catch for Continental, for whom he made two films. But Goebbels, in an attempt to attract French artistes to Germany, wanted him to make a German film, which he resisted. When Baur’s wife, of Turkish origins, was threatened, the couple gave in, moving to Berlin in summer 1941. Yet on their return to Paris they were arrested. Baur, in his sixties and in poor health, was repeatedly tortured and eventually sent back home, where he died in April 1943. Leteux’s research finally elucidates this mysterious episode. It turns out that, out of a mixture of fanatical antisemitism and professional jealousy, Edouard Bouchez, a former close friend and godfather to one of Baur’s children, had denounced him to the Gestapo as enjuivé (“tainted by Jewishness” through family and other connections). The chilling conclusion to the story is that, at the liberation, Bouchez was put on trial, yet escaped scot-free.

With the might of the Third Reich behind it, Continental, from its creation on October 1, 1940, until June 1944, when Greven decamped, was a key player in French cinema. Able to hire the best technicians, writers such as Georges Simenon, stars like Darrieux, Baur, Fernandel and Raimu, and seasoned directors such as Maurice Tourneur, as well as to foster new talents like Clouzot, Continental spurred a revival of the French film industry (after the break caused by the beginning of the war, that is). A francophile, Greven had worked with French film personnel in Berlin in the 1930s. In France, while he exercised an iron hand on shoots through Bauermeister, he accorded a margin of freedom to his creative staff. From the beginning French directors and writers established the right to choose their own topics, bereft of propaganda. As a result, several Continental films – L’Assassinat du père Noël, Les Inconnus dans la maison, Le Corbeau – are the most darkly caustic works of the period. In another of those paradoxes Greven gave work to a few Jewish film-makers, including Jean-Paul Dreyfus (known as Le Chanois), when most had to go into hiding. Hoping to create an American-style vertically integrated company, he built a cinematic empire with studios and a circuit of film theatres, vacated by the forced departure of their Jewish owners. In another ironic twist this branch of the business survived the end of the war and became UGC, a chain of multiplexes still with us today.

Leteux’s book is equally good at the wide-angle picture of a country and a film industry at war, and the small, unexpected detail. Among other things we learn that Jean-Paul Belmondo’s father, the sculptor Paul Belmondo, had also taken a trip to Berlin with a group of artists to visit the Nazi sculptor Arno Breker. Equally surprising, a man named Pierre Léaud (father of the new-wave actor Jean-Pierre Léaud) was the first member of the script department at Continental. We witness the best of behaviour and the worst.

If one wanted to nitpick, one could say that Christine Leteux is too economical with references to the numerous scholars who have worked on the topic before her; at the same time this makes for smooth reading. Equally, the book is well illustrated, notably with wonderful posters, although the black-and-white reproduction dulls their original colourfulness. Beyond these minor reservations, one can only agree with Bertrand Tavernier’s enthusiastic foreword and share his “jubilation” at this enlightening and, in spite of its dark and tragic setting, entertaining book.

'Continental Films' reviewed in Sight & Sound magazine

 I am thrilled to post this review of my 'Continental Films' book published 

in the May 2023 issue of Sight & Sound:

Maurice Tourneur Conference Online

 If you are interested in Maurice Tourneur and his silent career, you can watch my conference online. Enjoy!

Interview on NitrateVille Radio about Continental Films

You can listen to the interview I gave Mike Gebert on NitrateVille Radio about 'Continental Films'. Just click le link below and go to 63 min:

https://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=33957#p271970

L'Assassinat du Père Noël (1941) à la Filmothèque, mardi 13 décembre à 19h30

 

Je présenterai la séance de L'ASSASSINAT DU PERE NOEL (1941, Christian-Jaque) à la Filmothèque du Quartier Latin, 9 rue Champollion, Paris 5e, mardi 13 décembre à 19h30. Venez nombreux découvrir ce magnifique film!

Review for Continental Films - French Cinema under German Control

My first review for Continental Films in the Shepherd Express and it's a good one!

French Cinema Under the Nazis

BY DAVID LUHRSSEN NOV. 25, 2022 8:40 A.M.

Collaboration or resistance? They are usually put forward as obvious moral choices, especially when faced by Nazism, and especially in hindsight or by people who never had to choose. During the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, there were those like Charles De Gaulle, able to go abroad and continue to resist, and those who resisted by engaging in guerilla warfare or circulating underground newspapers. And of course, there were others who actively collaborated with the enemy.

But in between, millions of people tried to continue their lives as best they could. What was the responsibility of public artists, especially actors and filmmakers, under the Nazi occupation? Should they have stopped working?

That’s the question underlying the penetrating monograph by Christine Leteux, Continental Films: French Cinema Under German Control. The answer for many actors and filmmakers was that movies must be made, lest they be drafted into compulsory work brigades and sent to Germany to labor in factories or farms. Culture workers held a precarious exemption to forced labor. There was also the question of keeping their audience entertained in a time of hardship—and the possibility of smuggling subversion into entertainment.

In his forward, French director Bertrand Tavernier praises Leteux’s book because it “shakes beliefs and prejudices, scrubs certain tall tales, and shows what lies below the tip of the iceberg.” Tavernier directed Laissez-passer (2002), a film about the studio the Germans established in occupied Paris, Continental Films, and recognizes very well the many shades of gray for those who kept working under Nazi oversight.

Leteux writes with a trial lawyer’s precision, packing copious research into just over 200 pages. Continental Films was incorporated by the Germans under French law and run like a “normal” movie studio—to a point. There were contract negotiations, casting decisions and distribution deals—and informants on the sets. An overheard negative remark about Germany could cost a grip or a star his job. Leteux has produced a detailed picture of an industry under duress that never bogs down in unnecessary details.

Continental’s German managers fled the Allied advance, and the French actors and crews were left to the mercy of the Resistance, some of whose fighters sought to make examples, execute rough justice or display their own sense of moral superiority. Many in the French film industry were jailed and interrogated for short periods. Some were placed under probation-like supervision. Many of those arrests were, as the author puts it, “worthy of a French farce.” And yet, the French justice system functioned well enough in the end. A handful of eager industry collaborators were sentenced to prison. Most of the film workers, who struggled during the war to accommodate themselves to an unwanted scenario, were able to resume their careers.

Continental Films: French Cinema Under German Control is published by University of Wisconsin Press.