En cas de malheur

Almost 35 years before Sharon Stone in BASIC INSTINCT (1992), French actress Brigitte Bardot offered unexpected insights. Bardot fights with the weapons of a woman in a film actually titled EN CAS DE MALHEUR.

Together with a friend, the young Yvette (Brigitte Bardot) commits an amateurish robbery somewhere in Paris, just as the young English Queen Elizabeth is visiting the city on the Seine. An experienced criminal defense attorney (Jean Gabin) actually succeeds in using unfair means to help the devious Yvette secure an acquittal. Of course, the price must be paid. The criminal defense attorney quickly falls for the beautiful thief, which also has significant consequences for the lawyer's loyal wife (Edwige Feuillere) and Yvette's Italian lover (Franco Interlenghi). Even when the lawyer transports Yvette and a maid (Nicole BERGER) to the provinces, the problems don't stop.

At the height of her stardom, Brigitte BARDOT acts on a par with French acting legend Jean GABIN. Such a vibrant drama, full of corruption and sexual addiction, could only have been created in France in the 1950s. In German-speaking countries, audiences had to wait for the films of Rainer Werner FASSBINDER.

The supporting actors in EN CAS DE MALHEUR are also excellent. Edwige Feuillere (1907-1998) draws on all her Parisian stage experience. Nicole BERGER (1934-1967) is known from A GIRL FROM FLANDERS with the later Academy Award winner Maximilian SCHELL. Franco Interlenghi (1931-2015) had already played one of the shoe shiners in Vittorio De Sica's neorealist classic of the same name. He also played Telemachus, the son of Odysseus (Kirk Douglas), in The Voyages of Ulysses (1954), based on Homer's epic.

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.

Gorgeous Brigitte Bardot is perfect as the mixed-up, spoiled young woman carrying on with an older attorney (Jean Gabin)who sets up her own fate. Mr. Gabin has always been a marvelous actor with a commanding presence at all times. Nice music and cinematography, but it's Ms. Bardot who makes it worthwhile. Beside her looks and sex appeal, her personality always shines through and she seems very comfortable on screen, even at a young age.

A 7 out of 10. Best performance = B. Bardot. You never quite knew where this film was going to end up, but it reaches a touching ending of closure for all concerned.

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.

A film with legends Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot that starts off strong, but lags considerably after the first 40 minutes or so. Bardot plays a desperate woman who tries to rob a jeweler with her friend, but things go south and she ends up hammering an old woman with a crowbar. She turns to a lawyer (Gabin) and offers herself to him in exchange for him defending her. He has to knowingly violate the law to do so, so there are some pretty subversive elements to this film. One character says "In hunger, you can do what you like, and afterwards you mustn't feel ashamed," justifying the violent crime. In addition to Bardot hiking up her skirt and later capering about naked after a bath, it openly references adultery, abortion, female sexual desire, and a ménage à trois with the maid. The lawyer's beautiful wife (Edwige Feuillère) is fully aware of what her husband is up to and in one scene drops him off at his lover's hotel. She accepts his indiscretions but with painful reservations, and Feuillère is fantastic in her scenes - I wish there had been more of them. The lawyer's assistant (Madeleine Barbulée) is also an interesting, but underused character.

Where the film goes with the setup is to show that Bardot's character is in some ways just like Gabin's - she likes sex, and wants to have it both ways. She carries on with other men after he sets her up in an apartment as a "kept" woman, and one of them (Franco Interlenghi) gets obsessively attached. The film has her ping-ponging between the two of them as they grow successively more jealous of each other, and unfortunately many of the scenes lack sizzle and are too drawn out. Gabin is too stiff and dour throughout the film, especially when he's with Bardot. He's only 54 here but he seems tired, except when he's explaining to his wife the situation and the two grow animated. Overall the film's editing in the back half should have matched what we see early on, and it probably should have been much shorter than 117 minutes. Towards the end I didn't care what was going to happen to these characters, and found the ratcheted up music tiresome.