Le Rouge et le Noir

In post-Napoleonic France, Julien Sorel, the son of a provincial carpenter, wants to rise. The army is closed to him; what is left is the church. He enters first as tutor to the children of a mayor and begins an affair with the woman of the house, Madame de Rênal; later he moves to a marquis in Paris and a new relationship starts with the marquis's daughter. Each affair carries him a step upward and puts him in danger at the same time. The source is Stendhal's novel of 1830; the two colours of the title point at the uniform of the army and the cassock of the priest, the two roads open to Julien. Claude Autant-Lara made an adaptation running past three hours and turned the novel's interior voice into narration. Gérard Philipe's Julien is calculating and defenceless at once. Danielle Darrieux plays Madame de Rênal. It became one of the most argued-over literary adaptations in France, and the tension between fidelity and cinema is plain in it.