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En cas de malheur
1958 Drama / Romance
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Credits
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Director: Claude Autant-Lara
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Script: Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, Georges Simenon (novel)
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Photo: Jacques Natteau
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Music: René Cloërec
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Cast: Jean Gabin (Maître André
Gobillot),
Brigitte Bardot (Yvette Maudet),
Edwige Feuillère (Viviane Gobillot),
Franco Interlenghi (Mazzetti),
Julien Bertheau (Inspector),
Nicole Berger (Jeanine),
Mathilde Casadesus (Anna),
Madeleine Barbulée (Bordenave),
Jacques Clancy (Duret),
Annick Allières (Noémie),
Jean-Pierre Cassel (Trumpet player)
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Country: France
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Language: French
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Runtime: 105 min; B&W
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Aka: In Case of Adversity; Love Is My Profession
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Summary
Two hard-up young women, Yvette and Noémie, plan to hold up a jeweller's shop.
The robbery is thwarted and the two girls flee, having knocked an old woman unconscious.
Yvette appeals to a respectable middle-aged lawyer, André Gobillot, to defend her
in court, offering herself as a prostitute to pay his fees. When Gobillot wins the
case, the lawyer turns his back on his wife and begins a passionate love affair with Yvette.
Then he discovers that Yvette is still seeing her former boyfriend, Mazzetti, who has
no intention of giving her up...
Review
Director Claude Autant-Lara was no stranger to controversy by the time he came to make
this film in the late 1950s. Earlier in the decade, he had ruffled more than a few
establishment feathers with such films as
L’Auberge Rouge (1951),
Le Blé en herbe (1953) and
La Traversée de Paris (1956) - all
of which dared to poke fun at the institutions and bourgeois milieu which the director
so thoroughly loathed. En cas de malheur
likewise created a storm of controversy when it was released, for its portrayal of a most
unorthodox love affair involving a respectable middle aged professional man and girl less
than half his age and situated several dozen rungs lower down the social ladder.
This was fire and brimstone stuff - particulalrly as the girl in question was played by
just about the sexiest female on the planet.
The film was released just at the time when social attitudes were beginning to change
in France - and massively so - after over a decade of post-war austerity and repression.
Ironically, it also coincided with the emergence of a radically new approach to cinema
- the French New Wave - whose main architects (notably François Truffaut) would
relentlessly attack Claude Autant-Lara for being too
conventional. This criticism of Autant-Lara's work now appears wilfully
absurd, for although his technique was indeed
conventional, his films always stood out from the mainstream, were of exceptional quality,
and include some of the great classics of French cinema.
Whilst En
cas de malheur may not rate as Autant-Lara's most inspired film, it is nonetheless
a very respectable adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel, with some memorable performances
from a top-notch cast: Jean Gabin, Brigitte Bardot, Edwige Feuillère and Italian
heart-throb Franco Interlenghi. Bardot had only just achieved stardom following
her appearance in Roger Vadim's ground-breaking
Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956) and
again she scorches the cellouloid as the seductive, sexually liberated woman with a mind
of her own, the kind of character which had, at the time, hardly ever been seen on the
big screen (certainly in France). The coupling of Gabin - a highly respected, conventional,
mature actor with a wild sex kitten in the form of Brigitte Bardot was calculated to raise
eyebrows, and it certainly did. The film's most famous scenes - where Bardot first
seduces Gabin and later appears before him naked - provided the establishment critics
with more than enough ammunition to slate the film as depraved and immoral.
Half
a century on, it's hard to see what all the fuss was about. May to December relationships
have become accepted in our modern liberal-minded society and so the film has lost most
of its shock value. This perhaps makes it easier to appreciate the film's artistic
strengths, the humanity and irony of the story it is trying to tell (which ultimately
boils down to a pretty familiar love triangle). The photography is particularly
noteworthy, having a noir texture which subtly evokes the distinctive atmosphere of Simenon's
original novel, conveying a cruel sense of fatalism and inescapable loss. The film
was remade four decades later as
En plein coeur (1998), directed by Pierre
Jolivet and starring: Gérard Lanvin and Virginie Ledoyen.
© James Travers 2007
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