Ces dames aux chapeaux verts (1949)
Directed by Fernand Rivers

Film Review

First published in 1921, Germaine Acremant's comic novel Ces dames aux chapeaux verts was such a runaway hit that its author wasted no time turning it into a stage play.  The play's success in turn ensured that a film adaptation was not long in the offing - that film, directed by André Berthomieu, was released in 1929 and starred Alice Tissot and Gabrielle Fontan.  A sound remake duly followed in 1937, directed by Maurice Cloche, with Marguerite Moreno and Pierre Larquey, and then, a decade on, another helmed by Fernand Rivers in the twilight of his long and productive career as a director and independent film producer.

By this late stage in his busy career, Rivers specialised in adapting well-known stage plays and would bow out in style with two commendable adaptations - Tire au flanc (1950) and Les Mains sales (1951).  Twenty years previously, he had collaborated with Sacha Guitry on his earliest films - Pasteur (1935) and Bonne chance (1935) - in the capacity of both producer and adviser.  Guitry's gentle influence on Rivers' subsequent work is not too hard to discern, rarely more so than on the exuberant and witty farce Ces dames aux chapeaux verts, which Guitry may himself have penned and directed in one of his more flippant interludes.

The novel's central theme concerning the empowerment of women made it highly controversial when it was first published in the 1920s but in the turbulent aftermath of WWII, at the dawn of an era of great social change, it was highly pertinent and, far from being dated, Rivers' film would have struck an immediate chord.  The go-getter heroine Arlette - played by the unrelentingly effervescent Colette Richard - is very much the woman of the future, whilst the four starchy old maid cousins she ends up being billeted with represent the past - womanhood frustrated and unfulfilled, victims of both convention and the male sex.

Of the four cousins none is more terrifying, nor more tragic, than the fastidious, habitually waspish Telcide.  It is the kind of comedy grotesque part that Marguerite Pierry - incidentally a frequent habituée of Sacha Guitry's films - excelled in.  The husk-like relic Telcide and seductively vivacious Arlette could hardly be more different and the clash of cultures and personalities provides ample opportunity for comedy, which Rivers and his talented lead actors mine with effortless panache.  Telcide is a monster but she is also a tragic character, and in one powerfully moving monologue (which shows Pierry at her best) we are made privy to the terrible series of events that made her the sour ogre that she has become.

As befits the obvious feminist slant of Acremant's original novel, the plot is driven and dominated throughout by the well-developed and believable female protagonists.  By contrast, the male characters are weak, ineffectual or just plain idiotic.  Henri Guisol's self-effacting schoolmaster Ulysse manages to be all three and can't help resembling a vague caricature of  Marcel Pagnol's Topaze, a part which the actor would no doubt have excelled in.  It is Arlette and her cousins - particularly Telcide and Marie - who take charge of the proceedings and bring about the happy outcome which appears so obviously beyond the reach of the ineffective males.  Viewed today, Ces dames aux chapeaux verts is as dated and prosaic as any French comedy of the 1940s, but in pointing the way to a new era of female empowerment it was years ahead of its time.

Film Synopsis

With her brother away working in Cameroon, Arlette, a sporty young Parisian, has no option but to stay with her four spinster cousins at their house in the country.  She receives a frosty welcome from the eldest of the four sisters, Telcide, who is unimpressed by her modern ways and insists on running her house like a convent.  Arlette makes herself useful by selling raffle tickles for the impending village fete and, in doing so, she makes the acquaintance of the timid schoolmaster Ulysse, who once had hopes of marrying one of her cousins, Marie.  It was ten years ago that Marie and Ulysse first met, but their matrimonial plans were thwarted by the former's parents, who thought their daughter deserved better than a lowly school teacher.  Realising that Marie and Ulysse are still pining for one another, Arlette contrives to bring them together.  Love comes knocking on Arlette's door when a handsome young aristocrat, Jacques de Fleurville, suddenly enters her life.  Knowing that she is Jacques's social inferior, Arlette convinces herself that there can be no future for them together.  Grateful for the help the enterprising Parisian has given him in sorting out his love life, Ulysse decides to repay her with a spot of matchmaking in her favour...