Bethsabée (1947)
Directed by Léonide Moguy

Film Review

Any connection with the Biblical story of Bathsheba is tenuous to the point that it is virtually undetectable in this lame adaptation of a novel by Pierre Benoit.  A popular author of exotic romances, Benoit is best known for his novel L'Atlantide, which has been adapted for cinema several times over, most successfully by Jacques Feyder in 1921.  Bethsabée was one of Benoit's more ambitious novels, but in their clumsy adaptation, screenwriters Jacques Rémy and Roger Vitrac succeeded in reducing it to a third-rate melodrama, where the multiple plot contrivances are unimaginably transparent and the characters are so shallow that they appear to be made of tissue paper.  Being a French film, we can forgive the writers for moving the action from British occupied India to Morocco under French control, even though the film ends up being as steeped in tacky colonialist sentiment as its source novel, but it is impossible to overlook its staggering lack of substance and excruciating attempts at manipulating its audience's emotions.  The film is so blatant that it is nauseous - no wonder it has been completely forgotten.  Like the foul product of a nuclear reactor, it deserves to be dumped where no one is ever likely to find it.

What makes Bethsabée all the more pitiful, a crime against not just the cinematic art but human feeling generally, is that it was clearly made on an ample budget and boasts a highly respectable principal cast headed by French cinema's leading lady of the time, Danielle Darrieux.  Still considered by some as 'damaged goods' after her association with the German run film company Continental during the Occupation, Darrieux was well-suited for the ambiguous femme fatale role - the classic 'woman with a past'.  You can imagine the fun that Joan Crawford would have had with this role, had it been better scripted and directed, but, having no such luck, Darrieux ends up as cannon fodder in the most grotesque species of tearjerking potboiler.  Far from being the complex mythical siren, Darrieux's two-dimensional character merely ends up looking like the wrongly maligned victim of circumstance - as the actress had been in real life.

Darrieux's capable co-stars - Georges Marchal and Paul Meurisse - are equally letdown by some appalling screenwriting and are clearly fighting a losing battle (as bloody and futile as any undertaken by the redoubtable spahis) to make their characters remotely convincing.  Constantly beset with clichés, Marchal looks every inch the poor man's Jean Marais that his detractors were so keen to label him as (although he ultimately proved himself a fine actor in such films as Luis Buñuel's Cela s'appelle l'aurore) and Meurisse is so stiff he looks as if he had spent the previous six months trapped in a trouser press.  The flaws in the writing and direction are further underscored by Jean Murat's implausibly calculating colonel and his frankly weird offspring played by a seemingly unhinged Andrée Clément (Norman Bates in drag).  Trivia fans can at least derive some satisfaction from the knowledge that Darrieux's younger brother Olivier appears in a minor role, as her chauffeur - he at least escapes with his dignity intact.

No actor comes off well in this film but the one who disgraces himself most is the director, Léonide Moguy, who seems to have directed the film in his sleep (most probably in a dark hotel bedroom on the other side of the solar system).  A Russian émigré, Moguy started out in France in the 1930s by working as an editor on films by such distinguished directors as Max Ophüls and Marcel L'Herbier.  After directing some respectable films in France - including the highly recommended Conflit (1938) - he made his mark in Hollywood in the 1940s with Paris After Dark (1943), Action in Arabia (1944) and Whistle Stop (1946).  He then plumbed the depths of mediocrity when he then returned to France to direct Bethsabée, arguably his worst film.  Immediately after this disaster, Moguy moved on to Italy where he made two of his best films - Domani è troppo tardi (1950) and Domani è un altro giorno (1951).

If Bethsabée has any redeeming feature at all it is Nicolas Hayer's photography, which achieves an effective contrast between the claustrophobic noirishly lit interiors and epic-feeling location exteriors.  Everything else about the film jars painfully, in particular Joseph Kosma's hideously bombastic score which pretty well decimates every ounce of dramatic tension that Moguy manages to somehow crowbar into the film.  By the standards of its time, Bethsabée is hopelessly dated.  It seems to belong to another era, if not another planet (one far lower down in the evolutionary process), and even if it had been made two decades earlier, with the same writing and directing team, it would still have looked corny and antediluvian to a fault.  It's the kind of unpardonably trite tear-jerker that gives melodrama a really bad name - and it is hard to believe that a director as capable and sensitive as Léonide Moguy could have foisted this monstrosity on us.

Film Synopsis

Georges Dubreuil, a spahi captain stationed at a French fortress in Morocco, is delighted when his fiancée, Arabella Delvert, comes to visit him.  By a cruel turn of fate, Arabella's former lover, Captain Lucien Sommervill, is in the same regiment and knows enough about her shady past to cause Dubreuil to reject her if ever he found out.  The stunningly beautiful Arabella makes an impression on every man she meets at the fortress, including Dubreuil's commanding officer, Colonel de Cervière. Suspecting that he has an amorous rival in Sommervill, Cervière arranges for the latter to be sent on a mission from which he has no hope of survival.  Sommervill's death devastates the one who is devotedly in love with him - the colonel's daughter Evelyne.  She intends to take her revenge by murdering Arabella...