Product Details

• Actors: Raymond Cordy, Henri Marchand, Rolla France, Paul Ollivier, Jacques Shelly
• Directors: René Clair
• Writers: René Clair, Francis Picabia
• Producers: Alexandre Kamenka, Frank Clifford, Roger Le Bon, Rolf de Maré
• Format: Black & White, DVD, Subtitled, NTSC
• Language: French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
• Subtitles: English
• Region: All Regions
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Home Vision Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: August 20, 2002
• Run Time: 83 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000067IY4
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #99,952 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "A Nous La Liberte (The Criterion Collection)" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

One of the all-time great comedy classics, René Clair's À Nous la Liberté is a skillful satire of the industrial revolution and the blind quest for wealth. Deftly integrating his signature musical-comedy technique with pointed social criticism, Clair tells the story of an escaped convict who becomes a wealthy industrialist. Unfortunately his past returns to upset his carefully laid plans. Featuring lighthearted wit, tremendous visual innovation, and masterful manipulation of sound, À Nous la Liberté is both a potent indictment of mechanized modern society and an uproarious comic delight.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ..., September 18, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: A Nous La Liberte (The Criterion Collection) (DVD)

... The film is fully intact as Clair intended, and the deleted scenes are available for us to see. The circumstances of these cuts by Clair are fully explained on the DVD's deleted scene menu pages (Clair cut the scenes between the original release and the 1950 reissue), so it is totally inaccurate to say that the film has been "mutilated" since it was the director who made the cuts. The reviewer from Lincoln needs to pay a little more attention to history and stop writing such misleading gibberish.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Unquestionable Classic, September 3, 2002

By 

tashcrash (South Shore, MA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Nous La Liberte (The Criterion Collection) (DVD)

Perhaps the most elegantly rendered feature film of the very early days of sound production (barring, perhaps, Chaplin's CITY LIGHTS), Clair's classic is such a seemingly effortless blend of romantic melancholy, bitter social criticism and gentle surrealism, that its many aesthetic qualities tend to overshadow the film's astounding technological innovations in the poetics of sound.
The fact that Criterion has thrown Clair's short film ENTR'ACTE onto the disc is reason enough to buy the dvd. The transfers of both the feature and the short are of superlative quality. It's an invaluable release.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Nous La Liberte, July 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Nous La Liberte [VHS] (VHS Tape)

A brilliant, elegant and sparkling French comedy. It resembles Chaplin's Modern Times, but is in many ways even funnier in depicting the similarity between factory and prison.