Marion Cotillard stirs interest in Two Days, One Night & The Immigrant

French actress Marion Cotillard can be seen in two of her lesser known but more interesting films this week.

Marion Cotillard in the award-winning French film Two Days, One Night.

Guilty pleasure it may be, but fans of both jazz and Dragnet will want to catch the 1955 crime thriller Pete Kelly’s Blues (Tuesday, 12.05pm, TCM). The comically stiff jazz enthusiast Jack Webb (Dragnet’s Sergeant Joe Friday) directed himself as a cornet player and bandleader in 1920s Kansas City who runs afoul of a local gangster (Edmond O’Brien) even as he woos a wealthy socialite, played by Janet Leigh. The intriguing cast includes a young Lee Marvin, Martin Milner (who went on to star in the
Webb-produced TV cop show Adam-12), and singers Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald. Hal Rosson’s wide-screen CinemaScope photography is a big plus, and so is the swingin’ soundtrack.

Crave more jazz? The great trumpet virtuoso Don Ellis is in fine form on the pulsing and percussive soundtrack of William Friedkin’s 1971 Oscar-winning crime thriller The French Connection (Wednesday, 8.35pm, Fox Classics). Gene Hackman, who also won an Academy Award, cemented his stardom as tenacious yet morally bankrupt New York cop “Popeye” Doyle, in search of French drug smugglers.

On the subject of chanteuses, in the few short years since she garnered international attention as songbird Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose after a decade or so in film and television work in her native France, peripatetic actress Marion Cotillard has become the hardest working woman in show business. Two of her lesser-seen yet more interesting films make appearances this week. In director James Gray’s 2013 drama The Immigrant (Monday, 6.25pm, Masterpiece), Cotillard stars as a durable Polish immigrant newly arrived in 1921 New York City. Her co-stars are Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner as contentious cousins.

The next year, the actress garnered a much-deserved Oscar nomination for her performance as a put-upon Belgian factory worker in the Dardenne brothers’ Sydney Film Prize-winning blue-collar parable Two Days, One Night (Thursday, 7pm, World Movies), which is the amount of time she has to persuade more than a dozen of her fellow factory workers to keep her from being made redundant. Cotillard will be seen shortly as the conniving wife of Michael Fassbender’s Macbeth in the much-anticipated new version by South Australian Justin Kurzel (Snowtown).

Fassbender fans won’t want to miss the second and final showing this month of Ridley Scott’s strange, ultra-violent and under-appreciated crime epic The Counselor (Friday, 6.30pm, Thriller). Critics faulted the admittedly verbose original screenplay from Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men), but the casting can’t be beaten: Fassbender is a naive businessman who becomes involved in a drug deal with some very bad people that include Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt.

The French Connection (M)

4 stars

Wednesday, 8.35pm, Fox Classics

Two Days, One Night (M)

4 stars

Thursday, 7pm, World Movies

The Counselor (MA15+)

3.5 stars

Friday, 6.30pm, Thriller