Watch Volpone For Free

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

i must have seen a different film!!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Maurice Tourneur's "war years" ,with the exception of "Mam'zelle Bonaparte " one of the few duds featuring Edwige Feuillère ,were a good time for him:"Péchés De Jeunesse" and "le Val D'Enfer" were pure Petainist moral but are still watchable for all that ;"Cecile Est Morte" was a good Simenon story;"La Main Du Diable" is his absolute masterpiece ,one of the rare attempts at a fantasy and horror movie which brilliantly succeeds in this country;its influence was strong on his son Jack's "Curse of the demon" (check the titles).And then there's "Volpone" .With a cast as stellar as this one ,how could a director be wrong?Some movies are protected by their own actors. Watching Harry Baur and Louis Jouvet together is just a joy .Add Fernand Ledoux and Jacqueline Delubac,Guitry's wife (for a while)and you've got one of the best casts of the Occupation days.Ben Johnson's work was adapted by a genuine French writer ,Jules Romains ,whose novels were often transferred to the screen,and the lines are often witty ,even nasty ,with lots of black humor.Tourneur's directing is one of his best for its disposable funds were probably not that much high at the time and he successfully recreated Venice in the studio with talent and skill.We've never the feeling we're watching a filmed stage production .And anyway Harry Baur,using a falsetto voice when he is dying,and taking from his neighbors everything he can steal with a little help from his good friend Mosca (Jouvet) who is even foxier than the fox ,portrayed a memorable Volpone."Volpone" can grab today's audience:its subject is money ,money ,money,lust for wealth .The lure of gain drive people to selling their wives or sons or daughters .How many lines featuring the word "sequin"?"Volpone" could be updated and remade in 2010 and the plot wouldn't have to be modified much.Anyway,Joseph L.Mankiewicz did it in 1967 where Cecil Fox ,helped by MacFly (check the names),was pretending he was about to die to lure his former lovers into a trap with promises of fortune .Frederick Knott replaced Jules Romains and the movie would have deserved a better fate .After a lot of brilliant movies (notably by the great Duvivier) ,Harry Baur ended his career on a high note: "Volpone" and "L"assassinat Du Père Noel" were splendid Swansongs.I have not seen yet his final (German) performance in "Symphonie Eines Lebens" .He was given away to the sinister Gestapo (they supposed he was a Jew;his late wife was but he wasn't.He was tortured and when he was released he weighed less than 40 kg (88 pounds)and died soon afterward.He was only 63.It was a major loss for the French cinema and stage.

It's superficially easy to 'read' this 1941 entry centering on greed as a metaphor for the Teutonic hunger/greed for power but I'll leave that to the academic pseuds. This is simply a brilliant filmic interpretation of a classic play - Ben Johnson was writing out of London around the same time as Shakespeare - and features a director, Maurice Tourneur and two leading players, Harry Baur and Louis Jouvet, at the top of their games. For good measure there's also strong support from Fernand Ledoux and a great time is had by all. Tourneur switches effortlessly from crowd scenes to duos and trios and Armand Thirard's camera-work is exemplary which may explain why Tourneur took him to Continental that same year. This is a nine out of ten going away.

The print I saw was of very poor quality, but that doesn't appear to matter. This is a filmed play, with totally uninteresting cinematography. The idea of actors acting, with all the pranks and scheming is promising, but not here. This isn't funny. If there was supposed to be some satire, it is lost.I suppose it is not uncommon, but this film, "Volpone", directed by Maurice Tourneur bares no resemblance to the films of his made three or so decades ago. In the 1910s into the 1920s, Tourneur was a pioneer the new art form in the states. His films were interestingly photographed for the times. "The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old England" (1914) referenced theatre, but in a rather cinematic way. "Volpone" is just one of the films he made in France, but it seems antagonistic to a filmmaker who was forging an identity for cinema more independent of theatre.

I feel so luck to have caught this rare film at CINEFEST the annual early & rare film festival in Syracuse, NY - March 2003. More film buffs should support these festivals and share their discoveries on the IMDB so other film fans can track these old titles down. VOLPONE (1941, Sirilzky Pictures, in French w/English subtitles. D: Maurice Tourneur) A cynical, unscrupulous merchant played by Harry Baur, named Volpone (aka "the fox") schemes with his servant to con his greedy `friends' out of their money by pretending to be ill and dying, knowing they will give him gifts in hopes of being listed in his will. He then sits back to enjoy the fireworks but his plan inevitably backfires, setting the stage for an ironic denouement.