The Fire Within

Flicks with The Film Snob

The Fire Within

Jan 27 2021 | 00:03:31

00:00 / 00:03:31

Show Notes

An alcoholic contemplates suicide in Louis Malle’s devastating 1963 film about the human desire for meaning. Louis Malle was a director of astonishing range. He did so many different kinds of films that critics have tended to underappreciate him, because they can’t put him in a neat little category. My favorite of his films is one of his earliest—the 1963 poetic drama The Fire Within. The story concerns Alain, an alcoholic in his mid-20s played by Maurice Ronet, who has just dried out at a clinic in Versailles. His American wife has left him, and when the film opens he…

Other Episodes

Episode 0

February 18, 2024 • 00:03:22

Revoir Paris

A Parisian woman who has survived a mass shooting feels compelled to remember the traumatic event that she has blocked out. Revoir Paris is...

Episode 0

August 14, 2020 • 00:03:38

Mother

A classic of Soviet silent film tells of a mother who is radicalized after she naively betrays her revolutionary son to Czarist authorities. There...

Episode 0

May 31, 2023 • 00:03:28

Saint Omer

The trial of a Senegalese immigrant to France for killing her own child brings up many issues for a French writer of Senegalese origin....