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Charles Dead or Alive (1969)
Director: Alain Tanner
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Like The Salamander, Tanner's first feature takes one person's life and examines it within an environment of ideas as much as within a physical one. Charles is a rich industrialist in complacent old Switzerland who reaches a crisis point in his life - one marked by a TV interview he gives - and walks out. He settles in with a youngish couple (she the daughter of a judge, he a sign painter), and his daughter, a member of a revolutionary student group, visits them. It's an isolated community, at odds with society at large, 'caught in a structure' as Charles says, 'that they can't accept'. As in The Salamander, Tanner uses the mechanics of New Wave film-making, but freshly, and is close enough to the unheroic realities of daily life in sad, materialistic, authoritarian Europe to make his film a rewarding experience.Author:
Cast & crew
Director: Alain Tanner
Producer: Alain Tanner
Cast: François Simon, Marcel Robert, Marie-Claire Dufour, Maya Simon, André Schmidt full cast
Duration: 93 mins
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