Occupe-toi d'Amélie (France 1949)

A marvelous French farce from director Claude Autant-Lara. The pace is beautifully established from the lengthy opening credits in a long long take as a rather portly bourgeois gentil-homme runs down a collonade – you know that attempt at running by a fattie in a hurry but constrained by a conceit of deportment – towards the camera which seamlessly recedes into the cinema, accompanied by a gorgeously insouciant musical accompaniment from composer René Cloërec. It turns out this gentleman is late for his role in a farce playing at a Paris theater. The scene as he hurries into the labyrinth of stairways and corridors backstage owes nothing to Max Ophuls – it is sin qua non elegant. In his dressing room, we get down to business as he exchanges a hurried conversation with a party of petit-bourgeios, which includes two bearded twins who must be the bizarro avatars of two of the the aviator triplets from A Night at the Opera. Later we cut to the streets of Paris with another elegant zoom pan from the street to a soiree in an upper floor apartment. The camera enters from the window takes in the scene and then pans to the right – we are on stage in the same theater! Of course Danielle Darrieux is gorgeous, and wastes no time in farcing it up. She slaps a servant who is caught sneaking a drink, and is immediately slapped in return! All this in the first 7 minutes – brilliant.