Les Orgueilleux (1953) - film review

A young woman, Nelly, arrives in a remote Mexican town with her sick husband.  Diagnosed with having meningitis, her husband dies a short while later and Nelly is left alone, having lost her money and her travel tickets.  She is drawn to a scruffy drunk named Georges who, she discovers, is an French expatriate who never recovered from the tragic death of his wife.

Les Orgueilleux was an ambitious attempt to break with the conventional romantic drama which dominated French cinema in the early 1950s.  Filmed mainly on location in Mexico and with some graphic depictions of human suffering, it has an hard-edged authenticity which the Paris-bound studio dramas of the period lacked.   Some of the images in the film still retain their power to shock, particularly the seemingly interminable shot where Michèle Morgan is injected with a syringe needle.

The only thing that mars the film is the traditional, overly cautious direction, which gives the film a dated feel and partly undermines the wonderfully heavy doom-laden atmosphere.  If only its director Yves Allégret had been a little more daring and gone more in the direction of all-out neo-realism this would have been an unequivocal masterpiece.  In spite of that, it remains an impressive work, which makes a perceptive and uncompromising assessment of human nature.

Sublime performances from Michèle Morgan and Gérard Philipe makes this a compelling and poignant film.  Morgan is particularly impressive, playing (against type) a slightly amoral character who has great difficulty showing her emotions.  She conveys the unspeakable hell of her character’s predicament with great force and subtlety, bringing a much needed humanity to what is pretty grim drama.

© James Travers 2002

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