And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956)

Marie Glory, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Christian Marquand, and Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman

Juliette Hardy: Brigitte Bardot
Eric Carradine: Curd Jürgens
Michel Tardieu: Jean-Louis Trintignant
Antoine Tardieu: Christian Marquand
Mme. Morin: Jane Marken
M. Vigier-Lefranc: Jean Tissier
Mme. Vigier-Lefranc: Jacqueline Ventura
Lucienne: Isabelle Cory
Mme. Tardieu: Marie Glory
Christian Tardieu: Georges Poujouly

Director: Roger Vadim
Screenplay: Roger Vadim, Raoul Lévy
Cinematography: Armand Thirard
Production design: Jean André
Film editing: Victoria Mercanton
Music: Paul Misraki

For an exploitation film, which is what Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman surely must be called, the director and his co-screenwriter, Raoul Lévy, certainly devote a lot of attention to crafting something of a plot and a smattering of characterization. But what the movie is really about is Brigitte Bardot's body, which upstages everything else, including a determined performance by the young Jean-Louis Trintignant, on the brink of a distinguished career. Trintignant struggles to make sense of the infatuated Michel, but there's not much written into the character beyond his status as the middle of three brothers, caught in a hormonal web. Bardot's Juliette is so obviously meant to mate with the virile oldest brother, Antoine, that the film seems to be marking time before the consummation of the obvious. And when that happens, there's little else for the story to do but either erupt in a violent fraternal conflict or trail off into unhappy uncertainty. It does a feint at the former before fizzing out into the latter, substituting an extended scene of Juliette flaunting her stuff for some musicians as the real climax. Bardot had genuine acting talent, as her work in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963) would reveal, but it was usually hidden beneath the other gifts that nature gave her, and Vadim did his worst to keep it hidden. Cinematographer Armand Thirard seems constrained by the aspect ratio of CinemaScope, frequently grouping his characters on one side of the screen while filling the rest with inessentials, like the staircase on the right side of the scene shown above, although he occasionally pulls off some interesting deep-focus compositions with this approach. Still his work on the film is probably most famous for a screen-wide shot of the nude Bardot that American censors slashed at ruthlessly.

Les Grandes Manoeuvres (René Clair, 1955)

Gérard Philipe and Michèle Morgan in Les Grandes Manoeuvres

Marie-Louise Rivière: Michèle Morgan
Armand de la Verne: Gérard Philipe
Victor Duverger: Jean Desailly
Félix Leroy: Yves Robert
Lucie: Brigitte Bardot
The Colonel: Pierre Dux
Armand's Orderly: Jacques Fabbri

Director: René Clair
Screenplay: René Clair, Jérôme Géronimi, Jean Marsan
Cinematography: Robert Lefebvre
Production design: Léon Barsacq
Film editing: Louisette Hautecoeur, Denise Natot
Music: Georges Van Parys

René Clair's first film in color is a pretty pastel confection set in a French village at the end of the 19th century, a period many French filmmakers were drawn to in part because it held a kind of autumnal glow before the harsh winter that would set in during the second decade of the 20th century. A handsome womanizing lieutenant, Armand de la Verne, stationed in the village before the beginning of the army's summer maneuvers, wagers that he can seduce the first woman to enter the room. She happens to be Marie-Louise Rivière, a divorcée who has opened a millinery in the village. And they happen to be played by Gèrard Philipe and Michèle Morgan, two of the biggest French stars of the day, both of them in middle age and endowed with a kind of gravitas that means the movie is not going to be a frivolous sex farce. For sexiness, we have a parallel flirtation between another lieutenant, Félix Leroy, and the saucy young Lucie, played by the saucy young Brigitte Bardot. Yet the film is weighed down by the more mature couple, to the point that Clair's romantic nostalgia never quite comes off the screen and engages the audience. It's lovely to look at, and it has admirers who defend its bittersweet tone, but it feels to me more like an exercise in period filmmaking than a fully committed work -- even though it was one of Clair's favorite films.

Spirits of the Dead (Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini, 1968)

Metzengerstein

Jane Fonda in Spirits of the Dead: Metzengerstein

Contessa Frederique de Metzengerstein: Jane Fonda
Baron Wilhelm Berlifitzing: Peter Fonda
Contessa's Advisor: James Robertson Justice
Contessa's Friend: Françoise Prévost

Director: Roger Vadim
Screenplay: Roger Vadim, Pascal Cousin
Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematography: Claude Renoir
Production design: Jean André
Film editing: Hélène Plemiannikov
Music: Jean Prodromidès

William Wilson

Alain Delon in Spirits of the Dead: William Wilson

William Wilson: Alain Delon
Giuseppina: Brigitte Bardot
Priest: Renzo Palmer

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louis Malle, Clement Biddle Wood
Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Production design: Ghislain Uhry
Film editing: Franco Arcalli, Suzanne Baron
Music: Diego Masson

Toby Dammit

Terence Stamp in Spirits of the Dead: Toby Dammit

Toby Dammit: Terence Stamp
Priest: Salvo Randone
TV Commentator: Annie Tonietti
The Devil: Marina Yaru

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Piero Tosi
Film editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Music: Nino Rota

Of the three short films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories collected here under the title Spirits of the Dead, only the third, Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit, a freewheeling version of Poe's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," really works. Roger Vadim's Metzengerstein is simply cheesy, with his then-wife Jane Fonda sashaying around in supposedly period costumes that are designed to reveal as much flesh as possible. The casting of her brother, Peter, as the man she loves, is obviously there to elicit a frisson of some sort, but it doesn't. Louis Malle's William Wilson stuffs a little too much of Poe's doppelgänger fable into its confines, and despite the presence of a cigar-puffing Brigitte Bardot, manages to pull whatever punches the story may have had, ending up rather dull. But Toby Dammit is a small gem, a concentration of Fellini's usual grotesques and decadents into a bright satire on celebrity: It's almost impossible to watch another awards show without recalling Fellini's acid-bathed take on it. Only the conclusion of the film really retains much of Poe, which suggests that Vadim and Malle might have been better off devising contemporary riffs on the material, as Fellini does.

Une Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957)

Brigitte Bardot and Henri Vidal in Une Parisienne

Brigitte Laurier: Brigitte Bardot
Michel Legrand: Henri Vidal
President Alcide Laurier: André Luguier
Prince Charles: Charles Boyer
Monique Wilson: Madeleine Lebeau
Caroline Herblay: Claire Maurier
M. d'Herblay: Noël Roquevert
Queen Greta: Nadia Gray

Director: Michel Boisrond
Screenplay: Annette Wademant, Jean Aurel, Jacques Emmanuel, Michel Boisrond
Cinematography: Marcel Grignon
Production design: Jean André
Film editing: Claudine Bouché

Michel Boisrond's Une Parisienne is also known as La Parisienne. I don't know why the indefinite article used for the original release in France was later changed to a definite article, but I wonder if the thinking was something like that of the French censors when they made Jean-Luc Godard change the title of his 1964 film from La Femme Mariée (The Married Woman) to Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman): They insisted that the definite article implied a kind of case study, that the adulterous wife of Godard's film became typical of all married women; changing the definite article to an indefinite one turned the film into the story of one and only one married woman. So maybe taking the reverse route, changing "a Parisian woman" into "the Parisian woman," was the producers' way of suggesting that all Parisian women were like Brigitte Bardot, then at her perky peak as an international sex symbol. Whatever the reason for the title change, Boisrond's film is a fairly banal sex farce, and the only reason to watch it is Bardot -- no one was ever more skilled at exploiting her own charms -- and some nice comic support from Henri Vidal and Charles Boyer, who gives himself over to this nonsense with his usual charm and professionalism.