En cas de malheur

This one was a tough watch. I've always liked Jean Gabin. He always reminds me of Spencer Tracy, just a great, solid, likeable leading man. Bardot, on the other hand, I never much cared for. Sure she's great looking, but as an actress she somehow never really convinced me. She's in the opening scenes of En Cas de Malheur, and she immediately rubbed me the wrong way and the movie never really recovered. I could'nt get passed her as an actress to get to the character she was portraying. Gabin was solid as always, I liked the music and the lady who played his long-suffering wife. The two hour running time is a bit too generous for the interesting but often told tale the movie is offering us. I hoped for more.

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.

Brigitte Bardot et amie invade a jeweler's shop and rob him. While they are doing so, a woman enters and complicates matters, so they knock her out. She may die. The friend is picked up, and Bardot heads to the well known defense lawyer, Jean Gabin. She has no money, so she raises her skirts. Gabin says nothing, gets her off, and then they begin an affair. Gabin is married to Edwige Feuillère. Bardot sleeps around, but says she loves Gabin, even as she has regular horizontal sessions with communist medical student Claude Magnier.

It's a last flare of Pepe Le Moko for Gabin. He's no longer the young criminal. He's older. He's solid. He's married, and Bardot is his last chance for.... if not love, then sexual obsession. Yet director Claude Autant-Lara is no poetic realist. The sexuality of his characters is not cloaked in symbols. It's Bardot walking around naked for a few seconds, it's Bardot and Magnier wearing the same sweater. To show they are linked.... and they must comment on it. There's no need for the audience to dig, it's all laid out for them, and as a result, it's less involving. The performances are great, but without the confidence of the director, there is no magic.

I have no doubt that every cinephile has his or her own favourite adaptation of the prolific Belgian novelist Georges Simenon. This is certainly one of mine. It is directed by Claude Autant-Lara whose last great film this was before his downward curve. Jean Gabin had long since ceased to play the underdog pursued by implacable fate and here gives a faultless performance as a well-heeled, world-weary and somewhat shady lawyer. Brigitte Bardot, in probably her best role, is the tantalising coquette with whom he becomes infatuated. Bardot herself was dismissive of most films in her career, understandably so, although I would be very surprised if this were one of them. The film is beautifully shot by Jacques Nattau with an excellent score by the director's favoured composer Rene Cloerec. Mention must be made of the divine Edwige Feuiliere, one of the greatest actresses of her generation. In one of her best film roles of the 1950's she is tremendous as the wife who turns a blind eye to her husband's peccadilloes. Her character's attitude typifies the thin dividing line between complacency and complicity. As one would expect from this director this is a well-crafted and deeply cynical piece about the frailties of human nature and is one of those films that really gets under the skin.

This is not a particularly well known movie among the anglophone crowd but it is definitely very advanced for its year of production, 1958. Yvette Maudet ("maudit" means accursed in French) as portrayed by Bardot is a constantly split personality that seems utterly unable to decide whether she wants the wealthy but old and not overly attractive Gabin or the young and handsome, but poor, Gaston. The way she enlists the services of Gabin as her lawyer is memorable and the scene so graphic and far ahead of its time that it was cut!

Curvaceous 22-year-old blonde Bardot is to die for but it is Gabin that carries the film with a masterly performance. Look out for Feuillere in role of Gabin's wife. She is apparently liberal and allows the affair to unfold and develop in the belief that her husband will eventually come back and she will remain in control of the marriage. Watch how she puts away her glasses when he comes into her bedroom so she looks more attractive to him... even though she knows she cannot compete with the much younger and voluptuous BB. Watch her loyalty to her husband as she sees him run after the mirage of young and callously carefree beauty, and she sees his business collapse and begin to affect her own life.

There is more: There is the extremely competent direction, an engrossing screenplay, and bewitching photography from director Autant-Lara and his team. It provides no happy end but this film has so much to offer that I can only encourage you to not miss it, dear reader.