Monsieur Klein

Movie
German title	Monsieur Klein
Original title	Mr. Klein
Country of production	France , Italy
original language	French
Publishing year	1976
length	123 minutes
Rod
Director	Joseph Losey
script	Franco Solinas
production	Raymond Danon , Alain Delon , Norbert Saada
music	Egisto Macchi , Pierre Porte
camera	Gerry Fisher
cut	Henri Lanoë , Marie Castro-Vasquez , Michèle Neny
occupation
Alain Delon : Robert Klein Jeanne Moreau : Florence Francine Bergé : Nicole Juliet Berto : Jeanine Suzanne Flon : Concierge Massimo Girotti : Charles Michael Lonsdale : Pierre Michel Aumont : Official Fred Personne : The Commissioner Jean Bouise : Seller Étienne Chicot : Policeman Gérard Jugnot : photographer

Monsieur Klein is a French feature film directed by Joseph Losey in 1976 .

action

1942: Robert Klein from Alsace lives as an art dealer in the German-occupied Paris and does business with Jews in need. One day a copy of a Jewish newspaper is delivered to him. In his efforts to have his name removed from the magazine's subscriber list, he gets caught in the crosshairs of the prefecture, which uses the subscriber list. Klein begins research and finds out that a Jewish resistance fighter has used his name and gone underground. Klein's attempts to prove his non-Jewish ancestry reinforce the police's suspicions. He, too, fell victim to the large-scale raid in which thousands of Parisian Jews were gathered and arrested in the Vélodrome d'Hiver before they were transported to Germany. His lawyer friend is no longer able to hand over the Aryan certificate that Klein sought in his Alsatian homeland in time, and Klein finds himself in the car with the Jew with whom he was doing business at the beginning of the film Way to the concentration camp.

Reviews

The film-dienst celebrated Losey's film in its contemporary criticism as a “ Kafkaesque parable about the guilt of the individual for the survival of fascism”. Monsieur Klein is "masterfully staged, photographed and acted."

Awards

The film ran in 1976 at the Cannes Film Festival in the competition for the Palme d'Or, where it had the disadvantage of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver . A year later, Monsieur Klein was nominated seven times for a César and won the most important French film award in the categories of Best Film , Best Director and Best Production Design . Alain Delon was also nominated for best leading actor , but Michel Galabru won for the role of Joseph Bouvier in Le Juge et l'Assassin .

See also

• French Jews and the Shoah
• Collaboration of the Vichy government in the German extermination of the Jews

Web links

• Monsieur Klein in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Internet Movie Database , title role name
2. ↑ cf. Lexicon of International Films 2000/2001 (CD-ROM)