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

August 16, 2022 • 00:03:23

Heavenly Creatures

The yearning and frustrations of two teenage girls in 1950s New Zealand leads to tragedy, in this wildly expressive film based on an actual...

Episode

September 19, 2020 • 00:03:26

Underground

A dark comedy that stretches across the 20th century in Yugoslavia, Underground is a film of excess that laughs derisively at the colossal waste...

Episode

October 05, 2020 • 00:03:09

Deep Crimson

Mexican director Arturo Ripstein dramatizes the notorious “Lonelyhearts Killers” case, transposing it to 1940s Mexico, and depicting the matter-of-fact nature of evil. In Deep...