Mademoiselle X

Playwright André Luguet returns home one evening to find a beautiful stranger on his doorstep. She faints at his feet, and when she comes to on his sofa a few minutes later she claims to know nothing of who she is, how she got there, or why there's a recently fired gun in her purse. To add to his troubles, Luguet's fiancée is due home any moment.

This is a style of stage comedy transferred, with no great inventiveness, to the cinema. It's very reminiscent of 1942's Boléro, which also has André Luguet as a dapper, befuddled and slightly preposterous leading man, struggling to preserve his dignity while his world crumbles and reforms around him. In my review of Boléro, I said that the main interest of that film was Arletty. Here, it's Madeleine Sologne, a familiar and distinctive face of French Occupation cinema, whose odd, angular beauty and sense of other-worldliness (enhanced by her role in the recent L'Eternel Retour) add a welcome air of intrigue to this otherwise routine comedy.

I agree with the precedent user:"Mademoiselle X" has almost nothing to do with cinema and is filmed stage production style;it could be fine if the writers had come up with great lines (for instance "Fric Frac" was first a play too,but it magnificently succeeded as a film),which is not the case here;Marcel Achard is not Henri Jeanson or Sacha Guitry .Very little in this film commends itself:Madeleine Sologne could have given a dynamic performance,had she be given decent material .As the movie begins with a bout of amnesia,it could have been a wonderful spoof on the numerous Freudian American thrillers of the forties -which were not yet released in France,because of the Occupation- instead,it turned into a light comedy nay a farce .