From "marchands de fille" onwards ,Maurice began a cycle of movies dealing with the plight of the prostitutes ,displaying a social concern,and ruining it with ludicrous over the top melodramas .
Alice, the heroine, is a former prostitute ;she was born of an unknown father ,she would walk the street since she was 16 ; she wants to start all over again and now she works in a pharmacy where the boss woos her ,asking her to divorce her husband : she turns his advances away ;a phone call urges her to come back to her home where her husband ,a working man, is seriously ill ; her mother-in-law ,an overpossessive mom insults her and she's so petulant that the poor wife throws the hateful shrew out of the house.In the meantime ,her former pimp comes back and wants her to help him with his lucrative (but shady) business.And would you believe it? the poor hubby dies and his miserable wife is accused of poisoning him .She's arrested and sent to jail.
Well ,that's only the first fifteen minutes !
Now for the depiction of the prisons : Maurice Cloche is not Robert Bresson ("les anges du péché" ) by a long shot and he is not particular about details : strip search (but the prisoner keeps her bra, she takes it off outside the picture), suicide,lots and lots of screams , informers, a (topless) inmate is mauled
by prisoners who have gagged the warden ,severe (female) headwarden but human (male) one.All the clichés are here.
It's the heroine 's descent into Hell.She claims her innocence ,nobody but the chemist and her mom do believe her.First she rebels against this unfair retribution (she was pregnant -by her husband- when she was imprisoned ,and her mom takes care of the baby boy who was born in the jail hospital).
Will she be vindicated?
The cast is first-class, and it's pearls before swine when you deal with such rubbish :Danielle Delorme makes the best of her thankless part ;Jacques Duby reprises the part he played in " Thérèse Raquin" ,mommy's little boy ,but he's more headstrong and determined.; Jane Marken puts on again her act of the horrid mom-in-law : in "manèges " ,she was frighteningly efficient ,here she verges on self-parody; and one could expect more of the Delorme /Germaine Kerjean reunion , who were daughter /mother-in-law in 'voici le temps des assassins", headwarden and inmate here .
This is proof positive that highly talented actors are not enough;without a realistic screenplay (the ending is downright embarrassing) ,and a great director (Duvivier,Bresson , Yves Allégret) , this plea for the humanization of women's jails is not convincing at all.
