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Criterion Collection: The Marseille Trilogy (Marius, Fanny, Cesar)

In the 1930s, Marcel Pagnol, a leading light of the Paris theater, set out for new horizons as a filmmaker in his native Provence. His early masterpieces Marius, Fanny, and César mix theatrical stagecraft with realistic location photography to create an epic love story from the fabric of everyday life. Gruff, sentimental César (music-hall star Raimu) owns a waterfront bar in the old port of Marseille, where his son, Marius (Pierre Fresnay), wipes down tables and dreams of a life at sea. The prosperous, middle-aged sailmaker Panisse (Fernand Charpin), wanting to wed Marius’s sweetheart, Fanny (Orane Demazis), sets up a generation-spanning romantic triangle, the story of which unfolds in a series of fateful twists in the films of The Marseille Trilogy, which first earned Pagnol his place in cinema history. “If Pagnol is not the greatest auteur of the sound film,” critic André Bazin wrote, “he is in any case something akin to its genius.”

FOUR-DVD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restorations of all three films
• New introduction by filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier
• New interview with Nicolas Pagnol, writer-director Marcel Pagnol’s grandson
• Segments of Marcel Pagnol: Morceaux de choisis, a 1973 documentary series on Pagnol’s life and work
• Short documentary on the Marseille harbor by Pagnol
• Archival interviews with actors Orane Demazis, Pierre Fresnay, and Robert Vattier
• Pagnol’s Poetic Realism, a new video essay by scholar Brett Bowles
• French television clip about the restoration of the trilogy
• Theatrical rerelease trailer
• New English subtitle translations
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Michael Atkinson and excerpts from Pagnol’s memoirs"

GENRE: DRAMA/COMEDY

LANGUAGE: French

SUBTITLES: English

AUDIO: Uncompressed Monaural PCM

Widescreen

TIME: 395 Minutes

B&W