Cargaison blanche (1958)
Directed by Georges Lacombe

Film Review

Georges Lacombe's Cargaison blanche may have the same title as a 1937 film directed by Robert Siodmak but it hardly qualifies as a remake as the plot bares only the slightest resemblance, even though both films derive from the same article, Le Chemin de Rio, written by Jean Masson.  White slavery being a far less widespread phenomenon in the late 1950s than it was in the 1930s (or maybe it was just less widely reported), Lacombe's film immediately looks out-dated and irrelevant, although what offends most is its rambling and uneven plot which clearly belongs to a film of a much earlier decade.  Françoise Arnoul's dazzling star presence is the one thing that salvages the film and makes it more fun than it deserves to be.  Needless to say, Arnoul spends most of the film dressed in practically nothing, flaunting every last millimetre of sex appeal as if her life (or, more accurately, the livelihood of her producers) depended on it.

Jean-Claude Brialy is the only cast member who comes close to matching Arnoul's charisma and energy, but he is casually killed off in the first ten minutes so Cargaison blanche ends up pretty much as a one-woman show, with the super-sexy Arnoul dicing death with an atrocious script and a wild assortment of frightening older females.  There are some other male actors in the cast, but they're so bland and anaemic that you scarcely notice them, the two exceptions being our old friend Robert Dalban, who is hastily dispatched in the film's grimmest scene (the only one where Lacombe appears to be on form), and Georges Aminel, a sympathetic Martinican whose main claim to fame is that he dubbed Yul Brynner for the French versions of his films.

Oddly, for a film that supposedly condemns the exploitation of women, Arnoul is exploited left, right and centre, forced to strip to her frilly underwear in one scene by her employer, who obviously has matriarchal lesbian tendencies.  Aside from indulging the other characters' lurid sexual fantasies, Arnoul's ballsy reporter gives feminism a power of good.  Not only does she take the initiative and show qualities thought at the time to be the preserve of the male sex (courage, tenacity and cunning), she is incredibly independent and relies on no one but herself.  At the film's soppy conclusion, Arnoul promises her dull-as-ditchwater and generally useless beau that she will change her ways, before turning to camera and confiding in us: "I'll take far more precautions - next time."  This is the modern woman, and love her or her loathe her, she's definitely not going to go away.

Film Synopsis

After her colleague Jean is killed in a road accident, aspiring reporter Françoise soon suspects he may have been the victim of foul play and begins her own investigation.   Just before he died, Jean confided in Françoise that he was on to a story that would make him famous.  In her dead colleague's office, Françoise finds her first clue - the address of Madame Irma, a fortune teller.  On meeting Irma she pretends to have come to Paris to find a job.  Through Irma, she is soon engaged as a housemaid at the villa of the wealthy Maria Ploit, the owner of a successful import-export business.  One of Madame Ploit's associates, Monsieur Raymond, takes an immediate liking to Françoise and gets her a better paid job at a nightclub run by a woman named Mado.  The reporter soon realises that the nightclub is a transit point for a prostitution trafficking operation...