En cas de malheur (1958)
Directed by Claude Autant-Lara

Film Review

Director Claude Autant-Lara was no stranger to controversy by the time he came to make this, his last great film, in the late 1950s.  Earlier in the decade, he had ruffled more than a few establishment feathers with such films as L'Auberge Rouge (1951), Le Blé en herbe (1953) and La Traversée de Paris (1956), all of which dared to poke fun at the self-serving institutions and hypocritical bourgeois milieu which the director so thoroughly despised.  Le Blé en herbe was particularly controversial for its portrayal of an illicit relationship between a teenage boy and a middle-aged woman.  After the firestorm of feeling which this film ignited, you would have thought Autant-Lara would have learned his lesson.  But no, six years on, En cas de malheur featured an equally provocative cross-generation relationship involving a respectable 50-year-old man and a wild temptress who is less than half his age.  Autant-Lara inflamed matters further by his decision to cast Jean Gabin, a highly regarded serious film actor and mainstay of French cinema, with Brigitte Bardot, a recently established sex kitten whose colourful private life was seldom out of the papers.  The famous shot in which Bardot runs past Gabin in her birthday suit has become a part of French film legend and, from the reaction shot which follows, it is clear that Autant-Lara was fully aware of the impact it would have.

By 1958, things had changed somewhat since Le Blé en herbe had caused France's less liberally minded critics to choke to death on their own bile.  Roger Vadim's Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956) - the film that had made Bardot an overnight international sex goddess - had revolutionised the portrayal of sex in the cinema, and within a few years audiences and critics were far more relaxed about depictions of the seamier side of human relationships.  What made En cas de malheur so shocking was not its overt sexuality (the raunchy love scenes involving Bardot and Italian heartthrob Franco Interlenghi were daring for the time but ludicrously tame by today's standards), but rather its iconoclastic conclusion - that a respectable pillar of the community could throw over his career and his marriage so that he could take up with a conscienceless floozy young enough to be his daughter.  Did the right-wing invective spouters note that the relationship was portrayed sympathetically, as one founded on genuine affection rather than on mutual exploitation?  No, the film's detractors saw only what they wanted to see - a flagrant affront to middleclass morality of the most repugnant kind.  En cas de malheur was, in their eyes, perverse and immoral; in fact, it is one of the most progressive and humane French films of the decade.

Today, you can't help wondering what all the fuss was about.  May to December relationships of the kind depicted in the film are no longer a sensation and are generally accepted without comment, and not only for superrich film stars.  Whilst it is difficult to imagine what impact En cas de malheur had when it was first seen in 1958, it is much easier to appreciate its artistic strengths.  A highly respectable adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel, the film is as well-directed as any of Autant-Lara's other great films and offers some memorable performances from a top-notch cast.  Brigitte Bardot had no shortage of job offers during her brief but glorious period of stardom, but rarely did she have the opportunity to prove herself as an actress.  It was only by working with directors as talented and demanding as Claude Autant-Lara that she was able to show that she could act, and act well if the part was sufficiently interesting and well-developed.  Bardot's performance in En cas de malheur is one of her career highpoints, surpassed only by her superb turn in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (1963).  Jean Gabin's contribution is no less impressive and there is not a scene in the film in which we are given cause to doubt the intensity and integrity of his character's feelings for his flighty young mistress.  Edwige Feuillère turns in the most poignant performance as the devoted wife who must somehow come to terms with her husband's infatuation for someone she can only despise, and Franco Interlenghi spices things up with his slightly disturbing portrayal of the hot-blooded beau who ends up as Gabin's deadly rival.  

Forty years later, the film was remade as En plein coeur (1998) by Pierre Jolivet, with Gérard Lanvin and Virginie Ledoyen in the lead roles.  Needless to say, this remake, competently realised as it is, doesn't even come close to matching the brilliance of the original, which is now considered a classic of French cinema and one of Claude Autant-Lara's finest films.  After En cas de malheur, Autant-Lara's career would show a marked and irreversible decline.  His reputation tarnished by his association with extreme right-wing politics and by unforgiving critics who failed to comprehend his contribution to French cinema in the 1940s and 50s, the director died as he had lived, with a rage in his heart.

Film Synopsis

Yvette Maudet is a 23-year-old prostitute who leads a reckless and carefree life in Paris.  One day, she and her friend Noémie attempt to hold up a jeweller, but the scheme backfires when an old woman enters the shop and Yvette knocks her unconscious in a moment of panic. Yvette appeals to a respectable 50-something lawyer, André Gobillot, to defend her in court, offering her services as a prostitute to reimburse his fee.   With the help of some false testimony, Gobillot wins the case and takes Yvette as his mistress, much to the chagrin of his devoted wife Viviane.  Gobillot is outraged when he learns that Yvette has again started seeing her former boyfriend Mazzetti, but his attempts to break up the relationship can only end in disaster...