Star Astruc

 Alexander Astruc (1923-2016) was a seemingly academic director who was of greater significance to film history as the author of the influential essay Le Camera Stylo (The Movie Camera As Pen), in which Astruc posited persuasively that films should be composed by their 'authors' in the same way that novels are - that the camera, in short - was the director's pen. It was this article in coalition with the iconoclastic writings of the Cahiers du Cinema critics and the theories of Andre Bazin that championed the work of those half-dozen maverick French filmmakers and rolled out the carpet for the infinitely more bracing decade to come. 

 Alexander Astruc (1923-2016) was a seemingly academic director who was of greater significance to film history as the author of the influential essay Le Camera Stylo (The Movie Camera As Pen), in which Astruc posited persuasively that films should be composed by their 'authors' in the same way that novels are - that the camera, in short - was the director's pen. It was this article in coalition with the iconoclastic writings of the Cahiers du Cinema critics and the theories of Andre Bazin that championed the work of those half-dozen maverick French filmmakers and rolled out the carpet for the infinitely more bracing decade to come. 

Meanwhile, at the level of popular cinema, the liveliest developments were policiers and comedies. Never throw caution to the Lemmy wind. The first screen appearances of celebrated crime author Peter Cheyney's 'hero' Lemmy Caution was in 1952 in an episode of Henri Verneuil's film Brelan d'as (Full House) entitled Je Suis un Tendre (I'm a Nice Guy). La mome vert-de-gris (Gun Moll,1954) marks the historic fusion of Lemmy Caution with Eddie Constantine, the actor and crooner who was to become synonymous with Caution in Jean Sacha's Cet hommes est dangereux (The Man is Dangerous,1953), Dames Don't Care (Les Femmes s'en balancent,1954) and most notably in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), By 1953, the indigenous thriller was fairly well established and the first of the set was Becker's Touchez pas au Grisbi (Don't Touch The Loot, 1954) which is both the study of an aging criminal (portrayed by the inimitable Jean Gabin) and a meditation of friendship.