24 Hours in the Life of a Clown

1946 [FRENCH]

Documentary

4
IMDb Rating 6.2/10 10 827 827

clown clowning circus clown

Plot summary

The movie follows the clock round as music hall clown Beby takes off his make up, goes home for a meal, looks at photos and goes to bed to rise, spend a day in the village and perform with his new partner.

Director

Jean-Pierre Melville Photo
Jean-Pierre Melville

Top cast

Jean-Pierre Melville Photo
Jean-Pierre Melville as Narrator
Louis Maïss Photo
Louis Maïss as Clown
Beby Photo
Beby as Clown
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
169.14 MB
970*720
French 2.0
NR
us  
23.976 fps
12 hr 18 min
Seeds 1
314.1 MB
1456*1080
French 2.0
NR
us  
23.976 fps
12 hr 18 min
Seeds 3

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by gavin6942 6 / 10

24 Hours in the Life of a Clown

Follows the clock round as music hall clown Beby takes off his make up, goes home for a meal, looks at photos and goes to bed to rise, spend a day in the village and perform with his new partner.Melville, if known at all, is best remembered for "Le Silence de la Mar" and the incredible "Le Samourai". He is not known so much for short films in the 1940s that involve French clowns. And yet, that is what we have here.Is this a documentary or staged? Probably a bit of both. It appears the people involved were truly the clowns they were portraying, but the actual setup may have been slightly scripted. One suspects that not every day involves looking through an old scrapbook.
Reviewed by morrison-dylan-fan 6 / 10

Beby's Day Out.

Reviewed by boblipton 7 / 10

We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep

It's a day in the life of the Cirque Medrano clown, Beby.Jean-Pierre Melviille's first movie as director would seem to be a documentary short, showing the routine of a clown and his partner. It an odd choice for a director whose movies showed men under great stress, living by their own rough, confused and sometimes self-destructive codes of behavior. Yet it is in his actions that we see how the artist creates his art. It's composed of memories of other great clowns, and the set routines of his life off the stage. Together, in the hours before their show, Beby and his partner sit at a cafe and watch life go by them, arguing over how to distill the ordinary life before them into something for their audience: something grander, something more heartfelt, something funnier.Is this not what Melville himself tried to do in his films? With his moral gangsters and would-be-moral flics, with his fantasy images of Manhattan and failed boxers, was he not doing the same?The movie is shot wild, except when Beby is on stage. There's an uncredited narrator, a man in a trenchcoat and hat following the movie's subject: the stand-in for the creator of this film, trying to understand his subject by observing his actions. He thinks he understands Beby. Does he? Is the clown simply a distorted image of the director?
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