Film Culture (1956)

_— Siorm Center expresses courage and dignity, as well as honesty. The issue of freedom of expression in the United States is still a vital one, as recent cases have proved. A document of its times, this film is a much needed work of faith and hope. Its aesthetic, social and human values will appeal to sensible people as a healthy and welcome antidote to the usual Hollywood “fare.” —GEORGE N. FENIN THE PROUD AND THE BEAUTIFUL LES ORGUEILLEUX. Directed by Yves Allégret; screen play by Jean Aurenche and Jean Clouzot, based on Jean-Paul Sartre's “Typhus”; photographed by Alex Philips; music by Paul Misraki. In the cast: Michéle Morgan, Gérard Philipe, Victor M. Mendoza, Michéle Cordoue, André Toffel. Distributed by Columbia Pictures. The dramatic works of Jean-Paul Sartre are as noted for their emotional coldness as for the provocative quality of their intellectual content. Thesis drama is a limited means of theatrical expression, and Sartre's protagonists (usually existentialist heroes, motivated by the dynamic philosophical conception of the homme libre) move through the actions of their plots with the dispassionate precision of pieces in a game of chess. This limitation 1s pronounced in all of Sartre’s works, whether cast in the mold of the classic drama, as in Les Mouches, or in the more modern idiom of Hwis Clos, and it extends into the film adaptations of Les Mains Sales and Les Jeux Sont Faites. Audiences who become intellectually absorbed in the machinations of a Sartre plot while retaining their emotional objectivity toward the characters are inclined to emerge from the plays respecting the author's merits as a thinker rather than as a dramatist. It was obviously the difficulty of humanizing an intellectual thesis which most concerned director Yves Allegret and his co-adaptor Jean Aurenche in preparing a film version of Typhus, and they have chosen to solve the problem by emphasizing the love story at the expense of some of Sartre's weightier implications. By concentrating his analysis on the two central figures, both of whom are characterized in all their complexity, Allegret has managed to create an existentialist drama which is at once thought-provoking and emotionally moving. Les Orgueilleux (re-titled The Proud and the Beautiful for American audiences) is an unusually effective film, in the tradition of the fatalistic French drama of the 1930's (Le Jour Se Léve, Pépé Le Moko, Quai des Brumes), with the added dimension of a valid philosophical thesis. Nellie, the heroine of Les Orgweilleux, is a beauttful, sensual Frenchwoman bound by affection and solicitous maternal instincts to a sexually inadequate husband. When her husband suddenly dies, leaving her stranded in a remote Mexican village, she is appalled by her inexplicable lack of emotion. The wracking grief which accompanies her discovery that her money has been stolen only intensifies her sense of guilt; she is overcome by a feeling of complete isolation. Georges, her male counterpart, is equally isolated: he is a dissolute French doctor who is deliberately drinking him 26 self into oblivion in order to overcome an exaggerated conception of responsibility for the accidental death of his wife. The instantaneous physical attraction of the two is expressed by mutual antagonism; she is repelled by his slovenly degeneracy, while he resents the immaculate purity of her beauty and self-possession. The conflicting fascination and revulsion of this relationship reaches its climax in a brilliantly manipulated sequence in which Georges is forced to dance for a bottle of tequila while Nellie watches his humiliation with cold disdain. The alcoholic Georges is infuriated by her glance, and, in a frenzy of pride and wild exhilaration, he smashes his hard-earned bottle at her feet. Few women could resist a gesture of such nobility, and Nellie is not among them; she promptly falls passionately in love with him. The point of view which Sartre conveys in this drama is that man, having reached the depths of degradation, can then find himself free and begin again to build. This theory, if not wholly original, is nonetheless dramatically sound. When Nellie’s love forces Georges into a realization of the consequences of his self-pitying lethargy, he is able to regenerate himself as an existentialist hero by engaging himself in social action—in this case, by participating in the struggle to fight the typhus epidemic. Nellie, a more conventional person, finds her freedom through more elementary means. Recognizing her unexpected emotional involvement, she hastily seeks absolution in the confessional; this enables her to pursue her passion with a clear conscience. Nellie is presented as the essence of the eternal female; her love for Georges is uninhibited but highly domestic, and is largely motivated by a maternal desire to reform him. Her emotional candor is clearly established when, in a crucial scene, she reveals her love for Georges to a lecherous hotel proprietor who has brutally attempted to rape her. When the seducer contemptuously offers to call Georges to protect her, she quickly stops him, smugly asserting that she does not want her lover hurt. Georges’ weakness would hardly bother Nellie; it is instead the direct cause of her passion. At the film’s conclusion, she is running happily across the beach to encircle her newly-regenerated lover in her ever-protective womb. In directing this film, Allegret has made good cinematic use of the sordid atmosphere which invariably permeates Sartre’s works. The typhus epidemic in the hot, filthy Mexican village is the excuse for a number of brutal shock effects: religious images riddled with fireworks, a hypodermic needle inserted full-length into Nellie’s handsome backside, Georges blithely dining on the fat caterpillar in a bottle of tequila. The oppressive heat is skillfully conveyed, and emphasized by the monotonously persistent Mexican music. One of the most cinematically effective scenes shows Nellie, sweltering in her hotel room, stripping to her brassiere and slip and struggling vainly with an uncooperative shower and a recalcitrant electric fan. Allegret handles this atmosphere with finesse, and he is brilliantly served by his actors. Michéle Morgan, in a rare departure from