Amongst many men of my acquaintance, this season’s biggest blockbuster is not The Odyssey, but the new French epic De Gaulle. The first part, entitled Résistance, was released in British cinemas last month and has immediately become a cause célèbre with the kind of people who grumble that there hasn’t been a great war movie since the halcyon days of Where Eagles Dare and The Great Escape, and that the recent vogue for downbeat revisionism has meant that stirring and heroic tales of national fortitude have gone out of vogue. The second part of the story, Liberté, was released on 18 September. Presumably it, too, will find a ready-made audience, ready to thrill to the battle scenes and psychological duel between Simon Akbarian’s De Gaulle and Simon Russell Beale’s Churchill.

There was once a steady supply of iconic pictures being made from an industry that ploughed its own, distinctly Gallic furrow

There was once a steady supply of iconic pictures being made from an industry that ploughed its own, distinctly Gallic furrow

Anything that gets audiences to arthouse cinemas to see a mainly subtitled film has to be applauded. But I cannot help feeling nostalgia for the old days of French cinema, stretching roughly between the great work of Jean Renoir in the Thirties and the mid-Nineties, when Luc Besson decided that he had had enough of making French-language films and was going to try his luck in Hollywood instead. In between these points, there was a steady supply of iconic pictures being made from an industry that coolly scrutinized American excess and British repression and ploughed its own, distinctly Gallic furrow to come up with perhaps the most stylish cinema that has ever been made.

The first........

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