Underrated films

[chickenfeet]

Tell me about a film you think is under-rated or, at least, doesn't enjoy the popularity it deserves. Everybody knows about films like Lawrence of Arabia or Dr. Zhivago and the rest. What I want to hear about are some less well known gems.

My nomination would be The Duellists. It's based on a story by Joseph Conrad and was directed by Ridley Scott before he was famous. It has a fantastic cast; David Carradine, Harvey Keitel, Tom Conti, Albert Finney, Edward Fox, and it evokes the Napoleonic era better than any other film I can think of. It's lovely to look at and compelling from beginning to end. If you've never seen it, rush out and rent the DVD.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

René Allio's La Vieille Dame Indigne, and perhaps even better, his Les Camisards, certainly the only movie written in believable 17th-century French, about the rebel Huguenots of the Cévennes and the Ardèche.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Your recommendations are always really intriguing but the damn flicks are never available here!

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Actually, they're not available ANYWHERE, which is making me rather sad as I really, really wanted to see them again. (I should keep an eye on the Cinémathèque programmes...)

My father took me to see Les Camisards a very, very, very long time ago, and said it brought back family oral history (that side of the family comes from the Ardèche, and even today the religions are strictly divided by altitude - above 1000m, most everyone is Protestant; below, they're RC; the divide is between where the Dragoons reached and where was too difficult / dangerous to venture.)

[shezan.livejournal.com]

I also just realised, looking it up on IMDb, that La Vieille Dame Indigne is from a story by Brecht!