La Chatte (1958)
Directed by Henri Decoin

Film Review

The hazards of working for the French Resistance at the time of the Nazi Occupation are brought home in this gripping wartime drama, one of the more accomplished films to have been made by Henri Decoin in the latter years of his prolific career.  La Chatte is loosely based on the real-life exploits of Mathilde Carré, a notorious double agent who served in the French Resistance before switching her allegiance and becoming a German spy.  Although Carré was vilified after the war and branded a traitor, Decoin's film is surprisingly even handed and portrays her less as a calculating villain and more as a tragic victim of circumstances.  In the film, which offers a highly romanticised (i.e. mostly fictitious) account of Carré's activities, the heroine is played by Françoise Arnoul almost as a naive and reckless gamine, her betrayal being the accidental outcome of an amorous infatuation with a German officer posing as a Swiss journalist.

La Chatte doesn't quite match up to the excellence of the films that Decoin made during the war - Le Bienfaiteur (1942) and Les Inconnus dans la maison (1942) - but it is certainly one of his more compelling films, showing a level of care and artistry that is rarely encountered in his later films.  The mise-en-scène, lighting and editing all take their cue from American film noir and lend an almost unbearable tension to many scenes throughout the film.  One high point is the raid on a German command centre, which is superbly executed and could rival anything in a comparable Hollywood war film of this era.  Most memorable is the scene in which Cora (Arnoul) is taunted by a particularly nasty German officer (Kurt Meisel at his most chilling) after her capture.  Part seduction, part interrogation, the disturbing impact of the scene is heightened by its obvious erotic overtones.  This is Decoin at his most inspired.

The film's only real failing is a script that at times feels too contrived and simplistic to be remotely convincing.  Cora's motives are so vague that we are never given an opportunity to understand the character, so she remains a hazy enigma, impossible to fathom and hard to engage with.  The German soldiers and resistance members are dangerously close to 'Allo 'Allo-style caricature, more thinly sketched archetypes than well-developed individuals.  The only secondary character who rings true is the resistance leader, impeccably played by Bernard Blier.  Fortunately, Decoin does a remarkably good job of papering over the flaws in the script and strong performances from Arnoul, Bernhard Wicki and Kurt Meisel are enough to carry the film.

One of the most successful French films of 1958, La Chatte attracted an audience in France of just under three million.  This success led Decoin to direct an immediate sequel, La Chatte sort ses griffes (1960), with Françoise Arnoul reprising the role of the supposedly cat-faced heroine.  Between these two films, French cinema audiences were treated to a more authentic slice of life in the French resistance, Jean Valère's La Sentence (1959), and a decade on Jean-Pierre Melville released his similarly themed L'Armée des ombres (1969).  Whilst Decoin's far-fetched La Chatte films are by no means in the same league as these two great films, they are enjoyably compulsive, thanks in no small measure to Arnoul's seductive presence.

Film Synopsis

Paris during the Nazi Occupation.  A patrol of German soldiers raid a house from which illicit radio transmissions are being sent.  The man inside is killed whilst trying to escape but his wife, Cora, manages to get to safety.  Cora decides to have her revenge by taking her husband's place in the French Resistance.  Her first assignment, to steal the plans of a new missile, is a success.  Not long after this, she meets a Swiss journalist named Werner in a café.  She falls for his charms, not knowing that he is in fact a German officer...