Un soir sur la plage

Michel Boisrond has made rather mediocre movies in an undistinguished career.

"Un Soir Sur La Plage" is relatively interesting;the cast includes highly talented Jean Dessailly,Martine Carol,a cast against type Michel Galabru as the cop (whereas he was essentially a comic actor then ,in such comedies as "The Gendarmes series " where he would team up with De Funes and Genevieve Grad ,here cast as Carol's daughter).The biggest surprise is sixties starlet Daliah Lavi as a simple-minded nymphomaniac girl who is murdered on the beach.

The story is essentially a whodunit :in Martine Carol's house,there are many people (too many people actually) and they all have a reason to get rid of her ;do not expect a tour De force à la Agatha Christie :the solution is banal.

More interesting than the plot : the subjects which are hinted at : abortion,still illegal in 1961,and even euthanasia (although Cayatte and Richard Pottier had already broached the latter in the fifties ) And the last picture ,with the cop and his culprit in the car ,makes the ending less trite it might have seemed

An unabashedly commercial, luxurious, lightweight whodunit; the characters are delightfully rich, idle and attractive, seemingly living in an eternal state of vacation in a nice seaside scenery (though there is one shocking scene where a baby is almost killed). Tip-top female cast is a bouquet for the eyes: shapely Martine Carol (her black dress near the beginning stops the show), fresh-as-a-daisy Geneviève Grad (in her film debut), and the incredible Daliah Lavi, pre-Hollywood glamour and probably even hotter this way. Only the solution is disappointing because it is rather obvious at that point. *** out of 4.