BELMONDO R.I.P.

Actor Jean-Paul Belmondo has passed away. Belmondo rocketed to wide international attention in 1960 in Godard's new wave crime film, Breathless, and he became one of the leading stars of the 1960s-1980s in movies such as That Man From Rio, Pierrot le Fou, Casino Royale, and Le Magnifique. One particularly interesting tribute to the actor came from British Pop Artist, Pauline Boty, who saw a new wave coming in both cinema and youthful attitudes in the early 1960s. Boty's own life was cut tragically short in 1966 at only age 28, but her important contributions to the Pop scene often integrated pop-culture heroes and qualities of sexuality. Her painting "With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo" (1962), captured the French movie star’s sex appeal, as seen in Lattuada’s film, The Novice. Talking about the actor in an interview, Boty said, "There’s another kind of hero now and I think the nearest thing to a contemporary romantic image is Jean-Paul Belmondo. He lives carelessly like young people of today and according to his own morality. He’s lawless and creates about himself a feeling of anarchy. You feel he is completely free. He has no guilt and I think this, in particular, is the contemporary feeling. His freedom makes him full of a marvelous kind of wild energy and he belongs to the here and now. James Dean was the rebel image for rebel teenagers some years ago and Jean-Paul Belmondo is an idol of the freedom of youth today.” (Thomas Crow, Paul Mellon Lecture, 2017). Jean-Paul Belmondo was 88. Read his obituary at the Hollywood Reporter and BBC. Below: Boty's painting, "With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo." 

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BLU BELMONDO

New Releases: The Cohen Film Collection will release two 1964 classic films next month directed by Phillipe de Broca and starring Jean-Paul Belmondo: That Man From Rio and Up to His Ears. I'm especially looking forward to seeing That Man From Rio because some of the scenes were apparently filmed in front of Oscar Niemeyer architecture. From the press release on the Blu-ray site: "Arriving in the wake of the newly popular James Bond films, That Man from Rio and Up to His Ears were a cut above the many 007 spoofs that spilled forth worldwide. In That Man from Rio, set against the beauty of Brazil, Belmondo and Françoise Dorléac (the star of François Truffaut's The Soft Skin and Roman Polanski's Cul-De-Sac) are in hot pursuit of a stolen Amazonian statuette, while others pursue them for the same treasure. The colorful wide-screen comic adventure, recognized as an inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay (for co-writers de Broca, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Ariane Mnouchkine and Daniel Boulanger). It was named Best Foreign Language Film of 1964 by the New York Film Critics Circle. In the follow-up, Up to His Ears, loosely based on Jules Verne's novel "Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine," Belmondo plays a bored and recently bankrupted millionaire who is convinced to allow someone to murder him so that he can leave the insurance money in his will. He's fine with the plan until he meets a stunning stripper (Ursula Andress/Dr. No, She) and tries to cancel his deal, setting off a madcap chase across China and Tibet." Both films have had a 2K restoration and include docs about de Broca and Belmondo, making-of features, and trailers. 2-disc set. Street date is April 4th. I'm hoping we'll see the 1973 de Broco-Belmondo film, Le Magnifique, on Blu-ray soon. Great trailer for That Man From Rio below. Enjoy!

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