DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno

Lost in La Mancha proved that documentaries about aborted films could be compelling films in their own right. Failure is magnified when there are millions of dollars — and million-dollar egos — on the line, so it’s no wonder that the drama of dashed filmmaking makes for compelling viewing. In that spirit comes Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s look into the collapsed production of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Enfer (The Inferno). Clouzot had made his name before and after the war as a solid director of French thrillers, the so-called “French Hitchcock.” But by the early 60s, his work was seen as old-fashioned, as his generation of filmmakers quickly fell out of favor with the rise of the New Wave. Clouzot felt he could make a thoroughly modern film as well, and set out to break new ground with a story about a jealous hotelier and his young wife. The director was given a blank check by Columbia pictures, who were eager to cash in on the “New Wave” craze, and if they could do it with an established director, even better. But the shoot quickly spiraled out of control and was scrapped after only a few weeks. Clouzot would live for another 13 years, but only completed one more film. Bromber and Medrea managed to get access to all of the film Clouzot did manage to shoot, and show much of that footage to show what might have been, as they tell the story of everything that went wrong during the making of the film.

View the (NSFW) trailer.
Saturday at 4 p.m. and Sunday at 7:45 p.m. at the AFI as part of the European Union Film Showcase.

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Reel Portraits: John Ford’s Frontier

One of the most prolific directors in film history, John Ford directed 140 movies, including over 60 silent movies during the first 11 years of his career alone. He pretty much defined the look of the American Western, bringing to life the dusty and exotic vistas of parts of the country many Americans had never seen with their own eyes. And few actor-director teams have been as fruitful as the director’s work with John Wayne, with whom Ford collaborated on over two dozen projects, including the director’s landmark “Cavalry Trilogy,” two-thirds of which is screening at the Portrait Gallery this weekend. The first two legs of the informal trilogy are represented here, in Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon; in both, Wayne portrays a cavalry officer at western outposts. The Gallery skips over part three, Rio Grande, in favor of another Ford/Wayne matchup, and perhaps the director’s greatest Western, The Searchers, a dark examination of racism and revenge, in which Duke plays a Civil War vet on a lengthy search for a niece kidnapped by Indians.

View the trailers for Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Searchers.
Fort Apache screens tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the National Portrait Gallery, with a double feature of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers on Saturday at 2 and 5 p.m. respectively. Free.