En caso de desgracia

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.

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.

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.

The film under review closes off nicely Claude Autant-Lara's impeccable 15-year run of noteworthy pictures that had begun with 1943's DOUCE (see my upcoming rave review); it is also notable for being an unlikely but fairly successful meeting between the biggest (Jean Gabin) and hottest (Brigitte Bardot) stars in French Cinema at the time i.e. just before the outbreak of the "Nouvelle Vague" brought along a horde of fresh and irreverent talent. Adapted from a Georges Simenon novel, the plot of EN CAS DE MALHEUR is quite predictable and not entirely convincing but the consummate professionalism of all concerned smooths over any bumps that come up along the way. Bardot is an aimless youth who, together with her reluctant girlfriend, amateurishly attempts to pull off a small-time jewel heist that, inevitably, goes wrong and, eventually, picks up Gabin's name at random from a phone book to act as her defense counsel in court; not having the financial means to pay for his services, she elects to remunerate him in the only way she knows how: seduction. Although this particular sequence, as shown in the finished film, is disappointingly chaste, the deleted clip reproduced at the end of the copy I acquired is, however, too crude to be seen at such an early stage of the film and, in my opinion, the director was wise to jettison it; in any case, he did contrive to gives us a good look at the gloriously naked body (solely from the back, of course) of the 23-year old Bardot later on when she rushes out of the bathroom and into bed (much to the chagrin of Gabin's mousy secretary) of the apartment that Gabin provided her with! Needless to say, Gabin is already married (to the formidable Edwige Feuilliere) and, although on the surface she appears to condone Gabin's latest flirtation, she is obviously none too happy about it. To complicate matters further, Bardot is also seeing her irascible Italian lover (Franco Interlenghi) on the side and things come to a tragic head when she unwisely decides that loveless wealth is preferable to blissful poverty. Abetted by Jacques Natteau's noir-ish lighting and Rene' Cloerec's fine score, the colorful cast also includes three alumni from the films of Luis Bunuel, namely Julien Bertheau (appearing briefly at the very end as the investigating inspector at the scene of the crime passionel), Jean-Pierre Cassel (unbilled as an animated trumpeter, one of Bardot's casual lovers) and an unrecognizable Bernard Musson – and even Jacques Marin and Daniela Bianchi (also unrecognizable). While the film's 122-minute running time would seem overgenerous on paper, it is only the belated (and unnecessary) introduction of the character of Bardot's maid that makes one realize this as we lay watching; I strongly suspect that the film-makers wanted to push the boundaries of censorship even further by hinting at a possible ménage-a-trois between her, Bardot and Gabin but, perhaps thankfully, this is not made all that clear in the few scenes they share together…which is just as well since the huge difference in age between on screen lovers Gabin and Bardot and the above-mentioned nude scene had already raised the proverbial conservative eyebrows! For the record, the film was remade 40 years later as EN PLEIN COEUR aka IN ALL INNOCENCE with Virginie Ledoyen stepping into Bardot's 'shoes'.

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.