Nice effects though.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

FINALLY, Sunday! is one of the many films made by French auteur Francois Truffaut, shot in black and white. This one's a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Hitchcockian themes throughout, and it has a lightness of touch similar to Hitch's work of the 1930s. However, in the heavy hands of Truffaut I found it something of a chore to watch; the director's approach is to eke out every little bit of every little scene and the result is long-winded and oddly seriously despite the lightness of the subject matter. It's as if the director has been so painstaking that all the fun is taken out of the production.

Leave it to the French to find an American pulp fiction novel like Charles Williams' "The Long Saturday Night" and turn it to cinematic terms. Such was the choice of Francois Truffaut, one of the champions of the New Wave movement, and a fervent admirer of director Alfred Hitchcock, to translate the story into a French one, paying homage to his idol as he only knew how. The result was a film a step below of his great movies.The story is about Jean Vercel, a real estate agent, who is a suspect for killing both his wife, Marie-Christine, and her lover. Vatel goes to hide in his office and engages his secretary, Barbara, who is secretly in love with her boss to do the investigating as he wants to clear his name. It is clear that Barbara has a knack for getting to the bottom of the problem to help the man she loves.Truffaut shot the film in black and white. He worked on the screenplay with two writers he had worked before, Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Aurel. The result is a movie that was more a product of the way he felt about Hitchcock, and in many respects, also an homage to Stanley Kubrick, whom he also admired, than a deeply felt film. To prove how he felt about Kubrick, he has Barbara at one point ask a cinema ticket seller whether "Paths of Glory" is a love story. Mr. Truffaut must have been sick while involved in the project because he died shortly after it was finished.Fanny Ardant is the best excuse for watching the movie. She plays Barbara, the secretary that wants to exonerate her boss and acts as a detective. Jean Louis Trintignant is the accused man, Jean Vercel, in a role that didn't do much for him. This film was also a tribute to Ms. Ardant and the way the director felt about her.

This film, with some editing and a slight re-write could have been a fantastic film. I wonder if Truffaut's declining health (he died of cancer right after this was completed) perhaps had something to do with the roughness of the plot--there were too many plot holes to keep me engaged. Over and over throughout the film, the characters reacted WRONGLY to a given situation--often in VERY illogical ways. Let me point out a few examples: 1. When the main character confronts his wife about her adulteries, she admits it and treats him like dirt (I mean, she is REALLY obnoxious about it). Then, seconds later the police arrive and she asks him to tell the police she is not home. Fine. But then he DOES EXACTLY WHAT SHE SAID--even though any normal person wouldn't have given a rat's behind for her based on the previous scene AND because his lying to the police only served to implicate him for murder! 2. When the accused man's secretary returns after going to Nice to find clues, the man responds by slapping her--when she is trying to save his sorry butt! Then, she doesn't even get angry or yell at him for physically abusing her! This whole scene made no sense. Perhaps the French treat their women like that, but I seriously doubt it.3. A romance suddenly materializes just before the film ends. Where it came from and why it occurs makes no sense at all. For more info, see #2 above! So, in summary the movie has an excellent overall plot but is just too full of holes and logical errors to make it anything better than an average film. That's a shame because I'm sure Truffaut was capable of better.FYI--One little thing I really DID like about the film is the priest who gets decked towards the middle of the film. When he reappears, I had to laugh out loud!

Confidentially Yours aka Vivement Dimanche is a spoof/tribute to noir/detective/Hitchcock films. Someone (it won't take you long to figure out who) commits a brutal murder and the police suspect Jean Louis Trintignant ( a real estate agent) but his secretary (a girl Friday he has just fired, perfectly played by Fanny Ardant--whose movie this is) investigates (dressed in a trench coat -- why she must wear a trench coat is one of the gags), determined to clear him.It is a shaggy dog because it piles on the clues, close scrapes, crimes, etc. at ten times the rate of the films it salutes. It is a greyhound because it must get all that into 110 minutes, which it does with zest and comic theatricality (referenced of course by the subplot of a comic theatrical performance being given by Ardant's amateur theater group).As film making it would have been a lot fresher if it had been made in 1964 rather than 1984, but that should not effect your viewing experience of an expertly made madcap mystery. I would have preferred the film in color. I know why it is in black and white, but it does not seem to me to have any particular aesthetic merit as a black and white film. While no masterpiece, it was perhaps not a bad way to end a directorial career with a loving look back to all those great mysteries and screwball comedies of yore.