In 1950,something completely different from your usual French movie,directed by a woman (who is not Jacqueline Audry),a documentary ,in a way ,but with an actor , cast as"man of today" .
Jean-Pierre Aumont was the most famous young romantic male lead of the French thirties ;he is here the man of today ,the early fifties' John Doe,Mr Man -On -the -street.
Man on the road ,more like;a helicopter spots him ,lands and takes him away :they ask him where he is bound for;he wants to visit Paris,the catacombs ,the Mint,the Conciergerie ;then the man who takes him away in his plane,tells him he should become a man of tomorrow ,and leave a little the past behind.
After a little time in the cellars of Saint-Germain-Des -Prés ,and in the Café De Flore ,it is only natural that he meets Jean-Paul Sartre ;this scene sets a pattern for the rest of the movie where our hero will meet the most influential personalities of the era: architect Le Corbusier,writer André Gide,Picasso, scientists such as physicists Frederic and Irène Joliot-Curie and biologist Jean Rostand who prophesies cloning;at the time science went from strength to strength ,but the scientists never forget that the Earth is nothing but a dust in the universe ,and that man has invented his doom,the atom bomb;Sartre insists on the fact that the man of tomorrow must feel his responsibility ,even in events that concerns him vicariously;in 1950 ,the horror of the concentration camps were still on people 's minds . It's a dense movie,a ferment of ideas ,in a form which could not really attract the audience who wanted to be entertained after the dark hours of WW2;in spite of a Bafta award nomination,the movie is today completely forgotten.
Some kind of equivalent of "La Vie Est A Nous" (1936)for the early fifties,this Docu-drama is obviously dated ,but it is a true time capsule of the beginning of "Les Trentes Glorieuses" ,the thirty years boom after WW2
