La poison
(DVD)

Title from title frame.

DVD release of the 1951 motion picture.

Features: new high-definition digital restoration; new interview with filmmaker Olivier Assayas on director Sacha Guitry's influence on French cinema; On Life On-screen: Miseries and Splendour of a Monarch, a sixty-minute documentary from 2010 on the collaboration of Guitry and Michel Simon; new English subtitle translation; plus an essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau and a tribute to Guitry by filmmaker François Truffaut.

Music and songs, Louiguy ; director of photography, Jean Bachelet ; editor, Raymond Lamy.

Michel Simon, Germaine Reuver, Jean Debucourt, Pauline Carton, Jacques Varennes, Jeanne Fusier-Gir, Jean Duvaleix, Georges Bever.

"The writer, actor, and director Sacha Guitry emerged from the theater to become one of France's best-known and most inventive filmmakers, and La poison marked his first major collaboration with another titan of the screen, the incomparably expressive Michel Simon. With Guitry's witty dialogue and fleet pacing, this black comedy is the quintessential depiction of a marriage gone sour: after thirty years together, a village gardener (Simon) and his wife (Germaine Reuver) find themselves contemplating how to do away with each other, with the former even planning how he'll negotiate his eventual prison trial. Inspired by Guitry's own post-World War II tangle with the law -- a wrongful charge of collaborationism -- La poison is a blithely caustic broadside against the French legal system and a society all too eager to capitalize on the misfortunes of others"--Container.

DVD format, NTSC, region 1; fullscreen (1.33:1 aspect ratio); Dolby Digital monaural.

French dialogue with optional English subtitles.