La Fille du diable (1946)
Directed by Henri Decoin

Film Review

With its dramatic and distinctly noirish opening, a violent shootout between armed police and a bank robber, La Fille du diable immediately impresses as a full-throttle homage to the American thriller B-movie of the early 1940s.  The influence of American cinema, particularly film noir, is evident in several of Decoin's previous films, but here the director goes for a full-on pastiche, at least for the first ten minutes or so of the film.  Thereafter, La Fille du diable becomes something far darker and far more recognisably French - a cynical critique of a society that is poisoned by prejudice, hypocrisy and bogus morals.  Decoin's first film after the Liberation, it has a decidedly sour feel to it and can be read as an unflattering commentary on France during the Occupation and its grim aftermath - a companion-piece to H.G. Clouzot's Le Corbeau (1943).

At the time La Fille du diable was made, there was a severe scarcity of resources in France, and this is painfully apparent in its opening scenes, which rely too much on painted backdrops and back projection.  Overall, the film lacks the polish and fluidity of Decoin's previous films but it does have a distinctive feel, more redolent of the classic French polar of the 1950s than the American B-movie it pretends to be in its first reel.  Once the noir clichés have been dispensed with, the story takes an unfamiliar and quite disturbing course, implying that the more dangerous people in society are those who wear an honest face.  If only the characters had been fleshed out a little more and the narrative somewhat less disjointed this could have been one of Decoin's more honoured films, rather than one that is all too easily overlooked.

Whilst La Fille du diable has some obvious shortcomings on the directing and writing fronts, it does benefit from a fine cast, which sees Pierre Fresnay and Fernand Ledoux well-matched as the principal protagonists, two contrasting facets of evil.  A supposed pillar of the community, Ledoux emerges as the greater villain when he resorts to dubious means to achieve a righteous outcome (sounds familiar?).  As the gun-totting, child-beating thug, Fresnay is less convincing, and it is only when the better side of his character's nature emerges, late into the film, that he ceases to resemble a stock noir caricature.  Andrée Clément's Isabelle is the film's most interesting and well-rounded character, the alleged 'devil's daughter' who turns out to be a misunderstood adolescent at war with an inherently rotten community.  It is through her that we acquire a sense of the malaise afflicting French society in the mid-1940s, in particular that vile tendency to seek easy scapegoats (the young, the poor and the outsider) for the troubles of the time.  In this respect at least the film is still chillingly relevant.

Film Synopsis

After a bank robbery, the gangster Saget is on the run from the police.  A passing motorist, Ludovic Mercier, offers him a lift which he accepts gratefully.  Mercier is on the way back to his home town, Chatenay-la-Rivière, having spent the last 25 years in America, where he amassed a fortune.   Half-drunk, Mercier manages to crash his car into a bridge.  Saget, unharmed, takes Mercier's identity papers and his money before dumping the body into the river.  He then falls unconscious.  When he comes to, Saget finds himself in a doctor's clinic in Chatenay.  To his surprise, the doctor who tends to his injuries appears keen that he should get away with passing himself off as Mercier, even though he knows this is not his true identity.  The only person in the town who dislikes Saget is Isabelle, known as the Devil's Daughter because her father was a crook.  Saget soon realises the doctor's motive for protecting him...