Les amitiés particulières (film)

Les amitiés particulières
Directed by Jean Delannoy
Produced by Christine Gouze-Rénal
Written by Jean Aurenche
Pierre Bost
Roger Peyrefitte (novel)
Starring Francis Lacombrade
Didier Haudepin
François Leccia
Dominique Maurin
Music by Jean Prodromidès
Cinematography Christian Matras
Distributed by Pathé Contemporary Films (USA)
Release date
  • 4 September 1964 (1964-09-04) (France)
  • 7 November 1967 (1967-11-07) (U.S.)
Running time
 100 minutes
Country France
Language French

Les amitiés particulières (English: This Special Friendship) is a 1964 film adaptation of the Roger Peyrefitte novel Les amitiés particulières directed by Jean Delannoy. It starred Francis Lacombrade as Georges, Didier Haudepin as Alexandre and Michel Bouquet as Père de Trennes. It was released in English as This Special Friendship. The film was produced by Christine Gouze-Rénal, whose sister Danielle was the wife of future French president François Mitterrand. The filming location for the movie was the 13th-century Royaumont Abbey, some 50 km north of Paris.

The movie is mostly true to the novel, changing only relatively minor plot points such as Alexandre's suicide from poisoning to death by throwing himself from a train. Also, Alexandre in the movie is brown-haired, not blond, which also removes some of the inside jokes between Alexandre and Georges which are present in the book.

On the set of the film, Peyrefitte met the 12-year-old aristocrat Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle who had been cast as a choir boy and was a big fan of the book. Not only did Peyrefitte sign Alain-Philippe's copy of the book but the two also fell in love, pursuing a stormy relationship that Peyrefitte chronicled in some of his later novels such as Notre amour (1967) and L'enfant de cœur (1978).

Alain-Philippe Malagnac was later married to the French entertainer Amanda Lear and died in a house fire in 2000 at the age of forty-nine, shortly after Peyrefitte's death. It is unknown whether this was a suicide, even though Peyrefitte in his novels describes a "suicide pact" between the two, i.e. their intention to commit suicide if the other one dies.

Cast

Soundtrack

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.