Despite being a celebrated selection of the Cannes Film Festival, Paul Vecchiali’s 1970 arthouse giallo The Strangler was never released stateside. Thanks to a new 2k restoration by Altered Innocence, the psychosexual thriller finally gets a proper release a half-century later. Not only does The Strangler offer a stylized character portrait centered around a killer, but the restoration finally carves out its earned space in Giallo‘s history.
Emile seems like a nice guy. He’s handsome, loves his dog, and spends time at home crocheting scarves. Appearances are deceiving, of course; Emile uses said scarf to stalk and strangle lonely women whom he deems too depressed to go on living. As the death toll of mercy killings mounts, detective Simon Dangret (Julien Guiomar) finds himself resorting to unconventional, extreme measures to track the killer. That happens to include the assistance of the beautiful Anna (Eva Simonet), a woman who...
Emile seems like a nice guy. He’s handsome, loves his dog, and spends time at home crocheting scarves. Appearances are deceiving, of course; Emile uses said scarf to stalk and strangle lonely women whom he deems too depressed to go on living. As the death toll of mercy killings mounts, detective Simon Dangret (Julien Guiomar) finds himself resorting to unconventional, extreme measures to track the killer. That happens to include the assistance of the beautiful Anna (Eva Simonet), a woman who...
- 11/17/2023
- by Meagan Navarro
- bloody-disgusting.com
A gorgeously discordant pairing of image and sound depicts the killer of women Émile (Jacques Perrin) as he stalks his prey in the late writer/director Paul Vecchiali’s distinctly autumnal “The Strangler” — or “L’Étrangleur.” He pursues them from a distance, a sinister but jazzy interlude sometimes underscoring his menacing shadow-like presence.
The 1970 French arthouse giallo didn’t receive a release in the United States upon its premiere a half-century ago, despite being celebrated at Cannes. Distributor Altered Innocence brings the winking, melodramatic psychosexual thriller — anchored in the intersection of four strangers’ warring amoral main character syndromes amid Émile’s gendered murder spree — to American audiences this fall. This comes after showing at Austin’s Fantastic Fest and the New York Film Festival in September. It is restored with the help of Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (Cnc).
Vecchiali died earlier this year at the age...
The 1970 French arthouse giallo didn’t receive a release in the United States upon its premiere a half-century ago, despite being celebrated at Cannes. Distributor Altered Innocence brings the winking, melodramatic psychosexual thriller — anchored in the intersection of four strangers’ warring amoral main character syndromes amid Émile’s gendered murder spree — to American audiences this fall. This comes after showing at Austin’s Fantastic Fest and the New York Film Festival in September. It is restored with the help of Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (Cnc).
Vecchiali died earlier this year at the age...
- 11/16/2023
- by Alison Foreman
- Indiewire
Paul Vecchiali’s moody, labyrinthine The Strangler suggests the visual style of Jacques Demy’s Model Shop coupled with the psychosexual fervor of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s a queer version of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï by way of the story machinations of Claude Chabrol’s The Champagne Murders. Either way, it’s clear that Vecchiali’s interests are cinephilic in nature, and that this 1970 psychological thriller was his self-conscious attempt during the waning years of the Nouvelle Vague to take the movement’s genre-defying sensibilities in a new direction.
Throughout, Vecchiali is concerned less with plot than with mood and setting, which he largely establishes by showing people moving around colorful apartments and through the bustling streets of Paris. Take Anna (Eva Simonet), who rushes to a television station fearing for her safety after Simon (Julien Guiomar...
Throughout, Vecchiali is concerned less with plot than with mood and setting, which he largely establishes by showing people moving around colorful apartments and through the bustling streets of Paris. Take Anna (Eva Simonet), who rushes to a television station fearing for her safety after Simon (Julien Guiomar...
- 11/13/2023
- by Clayton Dillard
- Slant Magazine
Altered Innocence has acquired distribution rights for a new 2K restoration of the late French director Paul Vecchiali’s 1972 giallo “The Strangler” (“L’Étrangleur”).
The company will release the film in the United States for the first time this fall following screenings at the Austin genre event Fantastic Fest and the New York Film Festival. The restoration will then have a VOD and physical media release. The National Centre of Cinematography and Animated Pictures (Cnc) in France assisted in the restoration of “The Strangler.”
The film follows a murderer named Émile (Jacques Perrin) who targets women he believes are too depressed to keep living. Inspector Simon Dangret (Julien Guiomar) goes to great lengths, both unusual and unethical, to catch Emile. He is assisted by a woman named Anna (Eva Simonet) who is a potential target of the killer. The New York Film Festival describes the film as a “complex, melancholic...
The company will release the film in the United States for the first time this fall following screenings at the Austin genre event Fantastic Fest and the New York Film Festival. The restoration will then have a VOD and physical media release. The National Centre of Cinematography and Animated Pictures (Cnc) in France assisted in the restoration of “The Strangler.”
The film follows a murderer named Émile (Jacques Perrin) who targets women he believes are too depressed to keep living. Inspector Simon Dangret (Julien Guiomar) goes to great lengths, both unusual and unethical, to catch Emile. He is assisted by a woman named Anna (Eva Simonet) who is a potential target of the killer. The New York Film Festival describes the film as a “complex, melancholic...
- 8/25/2023
- by Jaden Thompson
- Variety Film + TV
Can radical theater make a good movie? Elio Petri continues his string of biting social comment movies with a black comedy about rich people, thieves, and the notion of ownership — it’s a caustic position paper but also a funny satire, with quirky yet believable characters. Ugo Tognazzi is terrific as scheming capitalist, as much a prisoner of his wealth as a poor clerk is of his poverty.
Property is No Longer a Theft
Blu-ray + DVD
Arrow Video USA
1973 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 126 min. / Street Date March 28, 2017 / La proprietà non è più un furto / Available from Arrow Video / 39.95
Starring: Ugo Tognazzi, Flavio Bucci, Daria Nicolodi, Mario Scaccia, Orazio Orlando, Julien Guiomar, Cecilia Polizzi, Jacques Herlin, Ada Pometti, Salvo Randone.
Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller
Film Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Original Music: Ennio Morricone
Production design / Costume design: Gianni Polidori
Written by Elio Petri, Ugo Pirro
Produced by Claudio Mancini
Directed by Elio Petri
Essere o Avere?...
Property is No Longer a Theft
Blu-ray + DVD
Arrow Video USA
1973 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 126 min. / Street Date March 28, 2017 / La proprietà non è più un furto / Available from Arrow Video / 39.95
Starring: Ugo Tognazzi, Flavio Bucci, Daria Nicolodi, Mario Scaccia, Orazio Orlando, Julien Guiomar, Cecilia Polizzi, Jacques Herlin, Ada Pometti, Salvo Randone.
Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller
Film Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Original Music: Ennio Morricone
Production design / Costume design: Gianni Polidori
Written by Elio Petri, Ugo Pirro
Produced by Claudio Mancini
Directed by Elio Petri
Essere o Avere?...
- 4/8/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Le Monde and Le Figaro are among the French papers reporting on the death of Julien Guiomar on Monday at the age of 82. Among the first roles mentioned in nearly every story are his Colonel Vincent in Jean-Marie Poiré's Papy fait de la résistance (Gramps Is in the Resistence, 1983) and his Commissaire Bloret in Les Ripoux (My New Partner, 1984) and Jacques Tricatel in L'Aile ou la Cuisse (The Wing and the Thigh, 1976), both directed by Claude Zidi. International audiences will probably know him best as the Colonel in Costa-Gavras's Z (1969); that same year, he played a Spanish priest in Luis Buñuel's The Milky Way. He also worked with Jean-Paul Rappeneau, André Téchiné, Claude Sautet and Jean-Claude Lauzon. All of the French obits mention Guiomar's deep background in the theater and his popular performances in television comedies.
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- 11/24/2010
- MUBI
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