Highly Overrated But Still Good

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

I didn't expect much from this one, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Gabin plays very well, and Bardot manages to be uncomplicatedly sexy. Her character is smart but lacking formal education (much like Bardot herself, I've often felt), and she shows us she can burn up the screen. Pulling an armed robbery with an accomplice, then trying to seduce Gabin so that he'll agree to be her lawyer--she never turns a hair on her beautiful blonde head.The two principals are surrounded by superb actors. Edwige Feuillere, after making L'Aigle a deux tetes and Le ble en herbe, had become the grande dame of French cinema (sort of what Meryl Streep is for us now) and here she is superb as the resourceful wife who is fairly sure she can deal with the threat posed by Bardot. Franco Interlenghi gives a deft performance as the young lover Mazetti--tough, a little vulgar, not willing to give Bardot up.Autant-Lara had to make a concession to 50's morality when dealing with Yvette's sexuality. Simenon shows us she is bisexual and very easy with her affections with the maid Janine as well as with the two men in her life. On screen we see very little of this: the censors could be happy.

The film under review closes off nicely Claude Autant-Lara's impeccable 15-year run of noteworthy pictures that had begun with 1943's DOUCE (see my upcoming rave review); it is also notable for being an unlikely but fairly successful meeting between the biggest (Jean Gabin) and hottest (Brigitte Bardot) stars in French Cinema at the time i.e. just before the outbreak of the "Nouvelle Vague" brought along a horde of fresh and irreverent talent. Adapted from a Georges Simenon novel, the plot of EN CAS DE MALHEUR is quite predictable and not entirely convincing but the consummate professionalism of all concerned smooths over any bumps that come up along the way. Bardot is an aimless youth who, together with her reluctant girlfriend, amateurishly attempts to pull off a small-time jewel heist that, inevitably, goes wrong and, eventually, picks up Gabin's name at random from a phone book to act as her defense counsel in court; not having the financial means to pay for his services, she elects to remunerate him in the only way she knows how: seduction. Although this particular sequence, as shown in the finished film, is disappointingly chaste, the deleted clip reproduced at the end of the copy I acquired is, however, too crude to be seen at such an early stage of the film and, in my opinion, the director was wise to jettison it; in any case, he did contrive to gives us a good look at the gloriously naked body (solely from the back, of course) of the 23-year old Bardot later on when she rushes out of the bathroom and into bed (much to the chagrin of Gabin's mousy secretary) of the apartment that Gabin provided her with! Needless to say, Gabin is already married (to the formidable Edwige Feuilliere) and, although on the surface she appears to condone Gabin's latest flirtation, she is obviously none too happy about it. To complicate matters further, Bardot is also seeing her irascible Italian lover (Franco Interlenghi) on the side and things come to a tragic head when she unwisely decides that loveless wealth is preferable to blissful poverty. Abetted by Jacques Natteau's noir-ish lighting and Rene' Cloerec's fine score, the colorful cast also includes three alumni from the films of Luis Bunuel, namely Julien Bertheau (appearing briefly at the very end as the investigating inspector at the scene of the crime passionel), Jean-Pierre Cassel (unbilled as an animated trumpeter, one of Bardot's casual lovers) and an unrecognizable Bernard Musson – and even Jacques Marin and Daniela Bianchi (also unrecognizable). While the film's 122-minute running time would seem overgenerous on paper, it is only the belated (and unnecessary) introduction of the character of Bardot's maid that makes one realize this as we lay watching; I strongly suspect that the film-makers wanted to push the boundaries of censorship even further by hinting at a possible ménage-a-trois between her, Bardot and Gabin but, perhaps thankfully, this is not made all that clear in the few scenes they share together…which is just as well since the huge difference in age between on screen lovers Gabin and Bardot and the above-mentioned nude scene had already raised the proverbial conservative eyebrows! For the record, the film was remade 40 years later as EN PLEIN COEUR aka IN ALL INNOCENCE with Virginie Ledoyen stepping into Bardot's 'shoes'.

When we are first introduced to bardot's character,her charm doesn't get through because,first she's chewing gum & then she plans a robbery that ends up in her hitting an older lady on the head and face.But when she gets to see a lawyer played by gabin and seduces him,we get seduced also by her character,at least for a little while.Because you see,bardot is a free spirit that not only was selling drugs and sleeping around but that seems to want to have a relationship with both gabin et her old boyfriend.Gabin is not always all that sympathetic of a character either.He doesn't hesitate to bend or cheat the law to save bardot.He hurts his wife mentally by having an affair and at first doesn't care that bardot is not a one man woman.This film has a certain famous reputation for having been censored and the 2 second scene featuring bardot lefting her skirt exposing her backside(gabin apparently sees the lower front but we don't) is available on the french DVD.It's hard to understand what the fuss was all about since past the 90 minutes,we also see bardot's butt in a slightly longer scene which wasn't censored.While the old boyfriend has an obsession with bardot and isn't such a good character, nothing indicated that his jalousy would push him to commit a crime.Yes,the film does indeed end with a sad conclusion which probably results in the film having a more powerful impact.This black & white film is way too long. At first,you feel that everything is wrapped up in about the first 30 minutes & that the rest of the film was written afterwards.Perhaps because i first saw bardot in pictures about ten years after this one,i'm more attracted to her older version in her less older films.So in conclusion,this remains an interesting film but a very uneven one also.

The phenomenal success of the Bardot myth, like that of James Dean which just preceded it, was very much the immediate response of the youth public to a need they felt in themselves and which Bardot was the first young girl to realize on the screen… In Claude Autant-Lara's film, Bardot came off as more than a sexual image, her persona giving life to the character she portrayed... The film contained of the most erotic scenes of her career: Brigitte was called on to raise her skirt in order to convince a skeptical lawyer to represent her case!In her frank demand for sexual pleasure Bardot is without any feminine guile, and the film contrasts her 'honesty,' for what it is worth, with the sophisticated behavior of the 'woman of the world' played by Edwige Feuillère… Gabin and Feuillère, dubious at first of appearing with her, claimed subsequently to have found her charming and intelligent, but at the same time nervous, full of self-doubt, and uncertain both of her talent and her beauty