| I as in Icarus | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | Henri Verneuil |
| Written by | Didier Decoin Henri Verneuil |
| Starring | Yves Montand |
| Cinematography | Jean-Louis Picavet |
| Edited by | Henri Lanoë |
| Music by | Ennio Morricone |
Release date |
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Running time | 120 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
I as in Icarus (French: I... comme Icare) is a 1979 French thriller film directed by Henri Verneuil. The title refers to Icarus, a Greek mythological figure.
The film's plot is based on the Kennedy assassination and subsequent investigation. The film begins with the assassination of President Marc Jarry, who is about to be inaugurated for a second six-year term of office. Henri Volney, state attorney and member of the commission charged with investigating the assassination (based on the Warren Commission) refuses to agree to the commission's final findings. According to the commission's rules, the member who refuses to go along with the conclusion of the investigation is tasked with re-investigating the assassination. Volney and his staff subsequently find many discrepancies in the official story, eventually uncovering a conspiracy between organized crime and the country's intelligence agency to assassinate president Jarry.
The action takes place in a fictional Western state where the spoken language is mainly French, but German, English and Spanish also are spoken. Its location, or even continent, is unknown. The capital city is made only of modern buildings, like Brasília. The political regime is presidential, the President being Marc Jarry at the beginning of the film.
The new town of Cergy in the northwestern suburbs of Paris was used as a filming location for the movie. The EDF-GDF tower designed by architect Renzo Moro is the building from which the shots were fired to assassinate president Marc Jarry. The governor's palace was the prefecture of the Val d'Oise. The huge room used for council meetings is the High Court of Justice. The long scene of the psychological experiment towards the end of the film, supposed to take place at the University of Laye, in fact takes place at ESSEC Business School in Cergy. This fictional Laye University is Yale University and the experiment shown in the film is the famous Milgram experiment, Stanley Milgram being a professor at Yale University. The filmmakers chose the modern and innovative architecture of the new town to avoid depicting any particular country. [1]
The film was awarded the Grand prix du cinéma français for Best French Movie in 1979. It received five César Award nominations in 1980, including Best Movie, Best Actor (Yves Montand), Best Screenplay, Best Music and Best Production Design.
Beginning on August 7, 1961, a series of social psychology experiments were conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, who intended to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.
Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.
Ivo Livi, better known as Yves Montand, was an Italian-born French actor and singer. He is said to be one of France's greatest 20th-century artists.
Z is a 1969 political thriller film directed by Costa-Gavras, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Jorge Semprún, adapted from the 1967 novel by Vassilis Vassilikos. The film presents a thinly fictionalized account of the events surrounding the assassination of democratic Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. With its dark view of Greek politics and its downbeat ending, the film captures the director's outrage about the junta that then ruled Greece. The title refers to a popular Greek protest slogan meaning "he lives," in reference to Lambrakis.
Konstantinos "Kostas" Gavras, known professionally as Costa-Gavras, is a Greek-French film director, screenwriter, and producer who lives and works in France. He is known for political films, such as the political thriller Z (1969), which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Missing (1982), for which he won the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Most of his films have been made in French, but six of them were made in English, including Hanna K..
Cergy is a commune in the French department of Val-d'Oise, to the northwest of Paris. It is located 27.8 km (17.3 mi) from the centre of Paris, in the "new town" of Cergy-Pontoise, created in the 1960s, of which it is the central and most populated commune.
Marguerite Monnot, was a French songwriter and composer best known for having written many of the songs performed by Édith Piaf and the music for the stage musical Irma La Douce.
"C'est si bon" is a French popular song composed in 1947 by Henri Betti with the lyrics by André Hornez. The English lyrics were written in 1949 by Jerry Seelen. The song has been adapted in several languages.
Henri Verneuil was a French-Armenian playwright and filmmaker, who made a successful career in France. He was nominated for Oscar and Palme d'Or awards, and won Locarno International Film Festival, Edgar Allan Poe Awards, French Legion of Honor, Golden Globe Award, French National Academy of Cinema and Honorary Cesar awards.
Is Paris Burning? is a 1966 black-and-white epic war film about the liberation of Paris in August 1944 by the French Resistance and the Free French Forces during World War II. A French-American co-production, it was directed by French filmmaker René Clément, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost and Claude Brulé, adapted from the 1965 book of the same title by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. The film stars an international ensemble cast that includes French, American and German stars.
Let's Make Love is a 1960 American musical comedy film made by 20th Century Fox in DeLuxe Color and CinemaScope. Directed by George Cukor and produced by Jerry Wald from a screenplay by Norman Krasna, Hal Kanter, and Arthur Miller, the film stars Marilyn Monroe, Yves Montand, and Tony Randall. It would be Monroe's last musical film performance.
Maurice Bénichou was a French actor. His best known roles include three collaborations with director Michael Haneke, and a part in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie. He has also played in Peter Brook's 1989 film version of The Mahabharata.
The Confession is a 1970 French-Italian film directed by Costa-Gavras starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret.
The 5th César Awards ceremony, presented by the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma, honoured the best French films of 1979 and took place on 2 February 1980 at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. The ceremony was chaired by Jean Marais and hosted by Pierre Tchernia and Peter Ustinov. Tess won the award for Best Film.
La Menace is a 1977 French-Canadian film directed by Alain Corneau and starring Yves Montand, Carole Laure and Marie Dubois.
The Tenth Level is a 1976 American made-for-television drama film movie starring William Shatner. Inspired by the Stanley Milgram obedience research, this TV movie chronicles a psychology professor's study to determine why people, such as the Nazis, were willing to "just follow orders" and do horrible things to others. Professor Stephen Turner (Shatner) leads students to believe that they are applying increasingly painful electric shocks to other subjects when they fail to perform a task correctly, and is alarmed to see how much pain the students can be convinced to inflict "in the name of science".
Gabriel Cattand was a French actor. He appeared in 108 films and television shows between 1950 and 1997. He starred in the 1969 film Klann – grand guignol, which was entered into the 20th Berlin International Film Festival.
The EDF-GDF tower is an office building built in 1974 in the heart of the new town of Cergy, France, in the Cergy Prefecture business and administrative district.
Henri Betti, born Ange Betti, was a French composer and a pianist.
André Hornez was a French lyricist and screenwriter.
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