Trailer
Plot summary
In a French prison, Émile and Louis are friends who share a cell. Prisoners there spend their days at a long table assembling toy wooden horses. Émile creates a diversion for a guard so that Louis can take a hook-shaped tool, and that night the pair slip out of their cell. Louis fastens a rope to the hook and scales the inner wall; when Émile follows, a guard sees him. Émile tosses the rope up to Louis and urges him to keep going. Louis climbs the outer wall and, panicked, runs into a road, where a bicyclist hits him. He takes the bicycle and rides off.
Cast
- Vincent Hyspaas Le vieil orateur
- William Burkeas L'ancien détenu
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about À Nous la Liberté (1931)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- In 1950, René Clair re-released his own film with two scenes removed: the flowers singing to Émile after he wakes in a field, and the sequence of Émile's date with Jeanne. The date scene had already been deleted in some countries when the film first came out.
SPOILER
Clair builds a sound trick carefully: an image of a flower plus an unseen voice makes the viewer believe the flower is singing, so that a chorus of flowers singing to Émile in his jail cell becomes believable. The singing is in fact a phonograph, revealed only when it runs down.- When Émile is cut in a small argument with Louis and Louis bandages the wound, the soundtrack plays an aural flashback: the non-musical marching of the prisoners, who wore wooden clogs.
- Many sound effects came not from natural sound but from Georges Auric's musical score: the phonograph factory's assembly line mechanization was depicted with xylophones. Even when Louis keys in numbers to retrieve the profiles of Jeanne and her uncle, music is the only accompanying sound.
