This title of this film, SUCH A PRETTY LITTLE BEACH (in the original, UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE) is ironic. The story is a very sad one. The film is an intensely moody and profoundly atmospheric French film noir. It is set in 1949 (the year of its release), and a young man returns to a tiny seaside French town on the Atlantic coast, near the town of Berck (which is mentioned in the dialogue as being nearby, and the location may thus be Cayeux sur Mer). In summer time it has 'a pretty beach', though not such a little one, as it stretches a long way. But it is winter, it is pouring with heavy rain day after day, and the weather is non-stop gloom. There are still defence fortifications along the beach, and a decaying blockhouse for machine guns, called a cabin, which is a hideaway of another young man who works in the small hotel in the town. The star of the film is the 27 year-old Gérard Philipe. He is silent, thoughtful, and preoccupied. He takes a room in the hotel. An old man is sitting in the hotel's bar and restaurant paralyzed by a stroke and unable to speak. He is the now disabled owner of the hotel. It is plain that he is startled and recognises Philipe, but he can say nothing, and Philipe tries to ignore him. A prolonged air of mystery pervades this film, as we wonder who Philipe is, why he has come to this strange out of the way place in such horrid weather, and why he wishes to say so little. It becomes obvious that he has been there before and knows the place well, but only the man with the stroke knows who he is. Philipe strolls along the beach, remembering his earlier time there. He visits the little cabin, and it is clear that it was once his own hideaway. We begin to realize that he, like the new boy, is one of the many war orphans who were fostered to people like the hotelier and effectively became slave labourers in their own country. The film is a savage attack on the system which permitted the nationwide exploitation and abuse of the state orphans. The new boy is in a state of constant misery, and the same had been true of Phiiipe, who we discover left five years before. Philipe tries to befriend the new boy and show sympathy for him, but the boy cannot accept it, and shies away. In the small hotel they keep playing a 78 rpm record of a French chanteuse singing a song in the style of Edith Piaf. This obviously upsets Philipe, who knows it well and does not want to hear it. Later in the story, he ends up smashing it in a rage. We eventually learn that he had been the 'slave boy' orphan in this very same hotel five years earlier. But the singer whom we have heard on the record stopped by, picked him up, and took him to Paris with her as her young lover. Philipe hated every minute of it, and after five years of miserable subservience to the woman, he has killed her. He has gone on the run, but having nowhere to run to, he has gone back to the only place he formerly knew, the little hotel which he had also hated, but at least it had once been the only thing he could call a home. The murder is widely reported in the newspapers and the police are looking for him. A young woman who works in the hotel helps him, as does a local garage mechanic. Will he accept their help and flee across the border into Belgium and be safe, as they urge him to do? Or will the power of the woman who 'owned' him overwhelm his ability to save himself, and thus destroy him in the end? This film is brilliantly directed by Yves Allegret, and it conveys such a powerful force of anguish and suffering in so few words that it is a work of directorial genius. The script, written by Allegret's frequent collaborator Jacques Sigurd, is a masterpiece of cinematic writing. The cinematography by Henri Alekan is pure visual and compositional genius, and it is just as well that the film is in black and white, because that intensifies the mood enormously. The performances are excellent, and every aspect of the production is successful. Gérard Philipe died tragically young at the age of only 36 of liver cancer. His loss was a tremendous blow to the French cinema, for he was one of the finest male presences ever to appear on the French screen. This film has been restored by Pathé, is now in Blu-Ray with English subtitles, and should be seen by all those interested in film noir, with the caution that it is highly sophisticated, deeply sombre, and exudes more melancholy than all the leopards in cages in all the zoos of the world. No one will be cheered up by this sad and brooding film, but for those who appreciate the art of the cinema, it is a wonder.
