La P... respectueuse (1952)
Directed by Charles Brabant, Marcello Pagliero

Film Review

With its themes of extortion, betrayal and redemption, Jean-Paul Sartre's play La P... respectueuse lends itself naturally to film noir, and because the story is located in an American town in the Deep South it made perfect sense for directors Charles Brabant and Marcello Pagliero to take as their model the hard boiled noir thrillers that were being churned out on the other side of the Atlantic.  It also made good commercial sense, as American films noirs were proving highly popular in France after the war, and many French filmmakers were quick to get themselves aboard this passing bandwagon.

La P... respectueuse, or La Putain respectueuse to give it its full unexpurgated title, was one of the more respectable attempts to cash in on the popularity of American film noir at the French box office in the 1950s.  Not only does it have a convincing American setting and an authentic noir look (Eugen Schüfftan's superbly atmospheric cinematography could not be more noir if it tried), it also has two glamorous lead actors who are almost a dead-ringer for Gloria Grahame and Robert Taylor - Barbara Laage and Ivan Desny.  (The latters' scene together in Laage's boudoir is one of the most brazenly erotic you will find in any French film of this era.)  You'd almost swear that this was the real McCoy, a pukka American film noir perfectly dubbed into French, and the only thing that gives the game away is the presence of a certain Louis de Funès in a couple of scenes (virtually unrecognisable as a decidedly nasty urban thug).

La P... respectueuse has the distinction of being one of the first French films to tackle head-on the issues of racial prejudice and racial intolerance, although by locating the story in America the film seems to imply this is more an American phenomenon than a French one.  The truth was that, at the time, France was as racially intolerant as the United States, evidenced by the country's willing complicity in the Holocaust and its subsequent unwillingness to face up to the consequences of this act.  Sartre's play was supposedly inspired by the real-life story of a gang of teenage boys (the Scottsboro Boys) who were unjustly prosecuted for rape in Alabama in 1931, but it may conceivably have been prompted by concerns over antisemitism nearer to home.

La P... respectueuse and Michel Gast's similar film J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1959) were ahead of the curve in raising public awareness about the race issue, and it would be another decade before American cinema would catch up and deliver as blistering a condemnation of racial intolerance, with Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night (1967).  La P... respectueuse is not only a fine example of a French pastiche of American film noir, it is also one of the most socially pertinent French films of the decade.  The only disappointment is that its authors opted for a veiled allusion to France's race problems in a classic genre mould instead of taking Sartre's play and making it more relevant to contemporary France - but maybe that would have been just too provocative.

Film Synopsis

Whilst taking a train journey in the southern United States, Lizzie McKay, a nightclub hostess, witnesses the killing of a black man by a drunken white man.  The latter turns out to be the nephew of a state senator, whose son, Fred, attempts to blackmail Lizzie into testifying against a black man, charging him with attempted rape.  Finally, Lizzie gives in and signs a declaration which clears the senator's nephew of murder whilst inculpating an innocent black man.  Chased across town by a lynch mob, the black man takes refuge in Lizzie's apartment...