'De Gaulle' Gets a Seven-Minute Standing Ovation at Its U.S. Premiere

Antonin Baudry's two-part World War II epic about Charles de Gaulle had its U.S. premiere on Saturday, 7 November, at the American French Film Festival in Los Angeles. Variety reported a seven-minute standing ovation after both films.

Both installments played back-to-back at the DGA Theater to packed audiences. Each one runs more than two and a half hours. The first part, De Gaulle: Resistance, is 160 minutes long and plays in French with English subtitles, according to the festival.

The first film follows de Gaulle as he tries to build a Resistance movement after France surrendered to Nazi Germany in 1940. Simon Abkarian plays de Gaulle, and Simon Russell Beale plays Winston Churchill. The production is a Pathé film with a budget of €74 million, which is about $80 million at current rates.

The films follow Pathé's earlier The Count of Monte Cristo and the two-part The Three Musketeers, which Samuel Goldwyn Films also released in the United States. In France, the De Gaulle films opened slowly, then picked up through word of mouth. They have sold more than six million tickets there. In the U.K., Resistance currently ranks as the highest-grossing French-language film of the year.

In the United States, Samuel Goldwyn Films is opening De Gaulle in theatres in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, Houston and Atlanta. The film will also be available nationwide on transactional video on demand, where viewers rent or buy a copy online. The second film, De Gaulle: Liberty, arrives in the U.S. in early December.

Peter Goldwyn spoke to Variety at the festival and said he is betting the saga can reach American audiences. He said that audiences are audiences, whether American or French. In a separate Variety interview published the day before the premiere, he said the film could easily play on 1,000 screens if it were in English.

The film has also been sold in China, where Light Films will release it in late November.

For a film in a language most American multiplexes do not program, the next few weeks will show how far subtitled French-language epics can travel in U.S. cinemas. The early December date for the second part is the next date on the calendar.