Ein so hübscher kleiner Strand

It's 1948,the French "nouvelle vague" is yet to come,and nevertheless "une si jolie petite plage" seems to announce the era. Gerard Philippe's character might be the missing link between Carné's desperate characters of the thirties ("le jour se lève","Quai des brumes")and the mistreated rebels of the late fifties/early sixties(Truffaut's Antoine Doinel ,Franju's "la tête contre les murs" hero). The landscape has rarely been so depressing that in this Allégret's masterwork;like Poe's "Usher house",it seems to influence the characters,to rub off on the hero .These desolate shores never seem to see the sun,the inn itself is hostile .For the hero,this is the end of the road,he has become a murderer,and having lost all his illusions,he comes back to this eating-house where he used to work as a child (he was an orphan)As the rain which keeps falling down,bad luck is here to stay:a young boy ,an orphan too,is working now in this miserable place and the hero urges him not to accept this miserable life with no future in sight,but in vain.The servant (Madeleine Robinson) tries to do the same for the young man whom she loves.All in vain.In the last pictures,a breathtaking tracking out takes us faraway from this doomed place as if the director himself wanted to escape such a darkness.Gérard Philippe used to regard this film noir as one of his very best.

The film begins splendidly, with Gerard Philipe arriving by bus to an out-of-the-way and out-of-season seaside town where it always rains and the beach is always empty. He checks into the little inn there claiming to be a student looking for some peace and quiet for his nerves, but clearly he has a big secret he is hiding, and an elderly resident of the inn seems to recognize him, too.

All this is established admirably, and the mystery and atmosphere it generates is first rate. Unfortunately, once we start to learn more of his story, the mystery falls away and the rest of the film is just interminable shots of Philipe wandering around in the rain and occasionally crying for no reason we can see. None of the other characters have any depth or believability to them, and many of their actions don't seem to make sense. Random generic statements about orphans throughout bog the story down and never add up to anything clear or meaningful. One gets the feeling the creators didn't get any further than the premise before starting making the film and then just gave up putting any more work into keeping the ball rolling.

So the second half of the film is undeniably a failure, but up till that point it's really very good indeed, and a great example of the kind of film noir that only the French could make.

His sensitive performance as Prince Myshkin in L'IDIOT (1946) had brought international attention, and his performance in THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH (1947) made him a star; with his next two films, LE CHARTREUSE DE PARME (1948) and UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE (1949), Gerard Philipe's position as the premier leading man of French cinema in the post-war period was assured.

Just as PEPE LE MOKO, QUAI DES BRUMES, LA BETE HUMAINE and LE JOUR SE LEVE had established the Jean Gabin persona in the 1930s (what Andre Bazin had termed "the tragic destiny"), so these four films established the Philipe persona, the sensitive young man overwhelmed by destiny. In UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE, the small seaside resort out-of-season, with its fog, its desolation, and its ramshackle buildings, is a perfect setting for this story of lost souls seeking connection and (possible) redemption. Madeleine Robinson, as the young woman working at the inn, is Philipe's counterpart: a sullen girl battered by circumstances who nevertheless is touched by the fragility of the young man. The fact that, on a realistic level, Gerard Philipe does not project the hardened facade of a criminal is rather the point: the point of a star persona. In this case, Philipe's projection of an intensely isolated, even alienated, psyche which defined the existential dilemma that was being defined by writers such as Sartre and Camus in the post-war epoch, was really enshrined in this movie.

Philipe would prove to be a more versatile actor than initially assumed; his humor, his athletic vigor, and his exuberance can be seen in movies like FANFAN LA TULIPE and POT-BOUILLE. But UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE shows Philipe at the apex of his portrayals of tortured youth, a prototype for such stars as Montgomery Clift and James Dean.

This title of this film, SUCH A PRETTY LITTLE BEACH (in the original, UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE) is ironic. The story is a very sad one. The film is an intensely moody and profoundly atmospheric French film noir. It is set in 1949 (the year of its release), and a young man returns to a tiny seaside French town on the Atlantic coast, near the town of Berck (which is mentioned in the dialogue as being nearby, and the location may thus be Cayeux sur Mer). In summer time it has 'a pretty beach', though not such a little one, as it stretches a long way. But it is winter, it is pouring with heavy rain day after day, and the weather is non-stop gloom. There are still defence fortifications along the beach, and a decaying blockhouse for machine guns, called a cabin, which is a hideaway of another young man who works in the small hotel in the town. The star of the film is the 27 year-old Gérard Philipe. He is silent, thoughtful, and preoccupied. He takes a room in the hotel. An old man is sitting in the hotel's bar and restaurant paralyzed by a stroke and unable to speak. He is the now disabled owner of the hotel. It is plain that he is startled and recognises Philipe, but he can say nothing, and Philipe tries to ignore him. A prolonged air of mystery pervades this film, as we wonder who Philipe is, why he has come to this strange out of the way place in such horrid weather, and why he wishes to say so little. It becomes obvious that he has been there before and knows the place well, but only the man with the stroke knows who he is. Philipe strolls along the beach, remembering his earlier time there. He visits the little cabin, and it is clear that it was once his own hideaway. We begin to realize that he, like the new boy, is one of the many war orphans who were fostered to people like the hotelier and effectively became slave labourers in their own country. The film is a savage attack on the system which permitted the nationwide exploitation and abuse of the state orphans. The new boy is in a state of constant misery, and the same had been true of Phiiipe, who we discover left five years before. Philipe tries to befriend the new boy and show sympathy for him, but the boy cannot accept it, and shies away. In the small hotel they keep playing a 78 rpm record of a French chanteuse singing a song in the style of Edith Piaf. This obviously upsets Philipe, who knows it well and does not want to hear it. Later in the story, he ends up smashing it in a rage. We eventually learn that he had been the 'slave boy' orphan in this very same hotel five years earlier. But the singer whom we have heard on the record stopped by, picked him up, and took him to Paris with her as her young lover. Philipe hated every minute of it, and after five years of miserable subservience to the woman, he has killed her. He has gone on the run, but having nowhere to run to, he has gone back to the only place he formerly knew, the little hotel which he had also hated, but at least it had once been the only thing he could call a home. The murder is widely reported in the newspapers and the police are looking for him. A young woman who works in the hotel helps him, as does a local garage mechanic. Will he accept their help and flee across the border into Belgium and be safe, as they urge him to do? Or will the power of the woman who 'owned' him overwhelm his ability to save himself, and thus destroy him in the end? This film is brilliantly directed by Yves Allegret, and it conveys such a powerful force of anguish and suffering in so few words that it is a work of directorial genius. The script, written by Allegret's frequent collaborator Jacques Sigurd, is a masterpiece of cinematic writing. The cinematography by Henri Alekan is pure visual and compositional genius, and it is just as well that the film is in black and white, because that intensifies the mood enormously. The performances are excellent, and every aspect of the production is successful. Gérard Philipe died tragically young at the age of only 36 of liver cancer. His loss was a tremendous blow to the French cinema, for he was one of the finest male presences ever to appear on the French screen. This film has been restored by Pathé, is now in Blu-Ray with English subtitles, and should be seen by all those interested in film noir, with the caution that it is highly sophisticated, deeply sombre, and exudes more melancholy than all the leopards in cages in all the zoos of the world. No one will be cheered up by this sad and brooding film, but for those who appreciate the art of the cinema, it is a wonder.

The text we read at the beginning indicates the direction of the film; we are asked to sympathize with and not to condemn the orphans and abandoned children brought up in state-run facilities. We are told that these children often grew up to become the "elite" of society. The Gabin character in Carne's Le jour se leve also grew up on the "assistance publique," but he is a fighter for justice, unlike the passive, tormented Pierre. Yves Allegret has filmed Gerard Philipe as a sort of Christ-figure walking through the muddy streets of this third-rate resort town. There is a scene with Madeleine Robinson cuddling Philipe that is very much like the Pieta.

Jean Servais as the slimy Fred has some effective scenes; he reminds us of Jules Berry driving Gabin to murder in Le jour. If the script had focussed more on the conflict between Pierre, the killer of the club singer and Fred, the dead woman's old boyfriend, instead of devoting reams of script pages to the social and political aspects of homeless children (no matter how moving their plight may be) the noir tradition would have been much better served.

I'll finish by praising the actors: Servais is great, Jane Marken as the proprietress of the hotel is a model of petit-bourgeois intolerance, Carette's salesman is boring and right. Only Gerard Philipe fails to give a rounded performance because the script won't let him.