Movies: Abel Gance

A biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, tracing the Corsican's career from his schooldays (where a snowball fight is staged like a military campaign) to his flight from Corsica, through the French Revolution (where a real storm is intercut with a political s...

A stranger called Allan goes to the House of Usher. He is the sole friend of Roderick Usher, who lives in the eerie house with his sick wife Madeleine. When she dies, Roderick does not accept her death, and in the dark night, Madeleine returns....

In pre-World Ward I in Paris, a budding artist, Pierre LeBlanc, falls in love and marries Janine, a dressmaker's assistant. Pierre has a flair for designing clothes, and he and his bride live in a blissful paradise, until the war breaks out and he be...

After serving in the trenches of World War I, Jean Diaz recoils with such horror that he renounces love and personal pleasure to immerse himself in scientific research, seeking a machine to prevent war. He thinks he has succeeded, but the government ...

Sisif, a railwayman, saves a young girl named Norma orphaned by a train crash and raises her as his own daughter alongside his son, Elie. As she becomes an adult, Sisif grapples with whether to tell Norma the truth about her parentage....

Max accepts a wager that he cannot remain in a haunted castle for one hour (11 PM to midnight) without crying for help. As soon as he arrives he encounters strange and nightmarish visions, but he is nevertheless on the verge of winning the bet when a...

Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself emperor and fights the English, Austrians and Russians in 1802....

The story of two men, one married, the other the lover of the other's wife, who meet in the trenches of the First World War, and how their tale becomes a microcosm for the horrors of war....

Marguerite de Valois, daughter of Catherine de Médicis, celebrates her wedding with Henri de Navarre. Officially, it's a rapprochement between the League and the Huguenots. In fact, it was an opportunity to bring all the Huguenots to Paris and kill t...

The plot concerns a comet hurling toward Earth on a collision course and the different reactions to people on the impending disaster....

Abel Gance's 1971 sound edition of his epic 1927 'Napoleon', which contains much of the silent original, with new material shot and added in both 1965 and 1971, and with sound synchronization from both the 1932 reissue and this version....

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Duelist and poet Cyrano de Bergerac and musketeer d'Artagnan meet and team up to stop the conspiracy against King Louis XIII of France....

Lyrical biography of the classical composer, depicted as a romantic hero, an accursed artist....

French silent film pioneer Abel Gance directs this 1935 classic about Lucrezia Borgia, her brother, Cesare. and her father, Pope Alexander VI -- one of history's most ruthless and ambitious crime families....

France, the beginning of the XIV century. Every night, Queen Margaret of Burgundy and her two sisters arrange orgies, to which beautiful nobles are invited. The young men were brought blindfolded, and after a night of love they were killed and their ...

A scientist develops a powder that he believes will have the effect of distorting reality for those who take it. To test its effect tries it out on his assistant, a dog, himself and two young couples....

A second version of Gance's Napoléon, with sound....

Hardly one of French filmmaker Abel Gance's masterpieces, The Torture of Silence nevertheless has more dramatic and psychological value than your average romantic-triangle tale. Simply put, the film concerns a doctor, his wife, and his brother. The d...