René Clair

In 1920 René-Lucien Chomette began acting in films under the name René Clair. He performed in Louis Feuillade's 1921 serials L'Orpheline and Parisette, but in 1924 he began writing and directing his own films with the comic fantasy Paris Qui Dort (The Crazy Ray). Through the '20s Clair would make some of the most original and admired works of early French cinema, including the avant-garde short Entr'acte, the landmark early musicals Sous Les Toits De Paris and Le Million, and the classic satire A Nous La Liberté. Working in England and the United States during the 1930s and '40s, his films were dominated (sometimes overly so) by fantasy and whimsy, but he managed to inject some healthy venom into the Agatha Christie mystery And Then There Were None. He returned to Europe for his films of the 1950s and '60s, most notably La Beauté Du Diable (Beauty And The Devil) and Les Belles De Nuit (Beauties Of The Night).

~ All Movie Guide