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Tuesday March 19th 2024

Le Testament d’OrphÉe | 1960

Le Testament d'Orphée filming location: rue Obscure, Villefranche-sur-Mer, France
Le Testament d’Orphée filming location: the strange underground street: rue Obscure, Villefranche-sur-Mer, France

The final film of artist Jean Cocteau is a rambling, imaginative rumination on the nature of his art, with contributions from people as diverse as Yul Brynner and Pablo Picasso.

The strange underground street is rue Obscure in the old town of Villefranche-sur-Mer, the beautiful little fishing port just east of Nice on the French Riviera. The town's maze of narrow streets make it a favourite for car-chase sequences, in John Frankenheimer’s Ronin, non-mainstream Bond movie Never Say Never Again and Jean Claude Van Damme actioner Maximum Risk.

It was in Villefranche’s subterranean warren that the French Resistance was able to evade the German army during WWII.