Trailer
Plot summary
Alphaville is a city run by Alpha 60, a sentient computer that Professor von Braun built, and that has outlawed free thought, poetry, love and emotion while putting to death citizens who behave illogically. Into it drives Lemmy Caution, agent 003 from the Outlands, who signs in at a hotel as Ivan Johnson, a writer for the Figaro-Pravda newspaper. His errands are to find the missing agent Henri Dickson, to capture or kill von Braun, and to destroy the computer. Natacha von Braun, the professor's daughter and one of the programmers of Alpha 60, says she does not know what love or conscience means, and Caution takes her help. Alphaville's rulers intend to invade the outer countries.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Alphaville (1965)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Assistant director Charles Bitsch wrote a 30-page treatment for Alphaville and Jean-Luc Godard took it without reading it; translated into German, it went to the film's backers. None of it reached the screen, and the German backers asked producer André Michelin to repay the money.
- The guttural voice of the dictatorial computer Alpha 60 was performed by a man using a mechanical voice box that replaced his cancer-damaged larynx.
- The shot of Eddie Constantine's Lemmy Caution riding a hotel elevator up to his room was filmed by putting the camera operator in a second glass-walled lift beside him; cinematographer Raoul Coutard recalled the old elevators took multiple takes to synchronize.
- Eddie Constantine had played secret agent Lemmy Caution in dozens of films, but according to director Anne Andreu, Jean-Luc Godard's subversion of the character reportedly left him shunned by producers after Alphaville; he did not play Caution again until Panic Time in 1980.
- The German synth-pop band Alphaville and an affluent suburb outside São Paulo, Brazil, both took their names from the film.
- Though set in a future city, Alphaville was shot entirely in and around Paris with no special sets or props built; the Electricity Board building stood in for the Alpha 60 computer centre and Le Grand Hotel also appears.
