La Fille de Hambourg (1958)
Directed by Yves Allégret

Film Review

From the mid-1950s onwards, director Yves Allégret pretty well gave up trying to be a serious filmmaker and instead contented himself with churning out hollow crowdpleasers that now appear vacuous and uninspired compared with his earlier noir masterpieces.  There's not much sign of the once celebrated auteur in the facile thriller Méfiez-vous fillettes (1957) or bland political drama Konga Yo (1962), and it is only in La Fille de Hambourg (1958) that we catch the merest glimpse of the director who crafted two of the best and grimmest French films noirs, Dédée d'Anvers (1948) and Manèges (1950).  It's as if the car accident that tragically robbed Allégret of his son Gilles in 1955 also took from French cinema one of its most talented film directors.

Going by both its subject and its distinctly noirish mood, La Fille de Hambourg bears more than a passing resemblance to Allégret's most highly regarded films.  Its tale of a doomed romance in the less salubrious precincts of a busy seaport carries more than a faint echo of pre-WWII poetic realism, an impression that can only be reinforced by Armand Thirard's sombre photography, at its most ominous in the location shots, which lean towards Italian neo-realism.  Daniel Gélin and Hildegard Knef form a pair of star-crossed lovers that is every bit as iconic as the pairing of Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan in Marcel Carné's Le Quai des brumes (1938), and yet, somehow, this late 1950s reworking of Romeo and Juliet can't help feeling somewhat lacking.

Throughout the film, there is an abiding impression that Allégret is engaged in a futile exercise in self-imitation.  La Fille de Hambourg feels like a pastiche of Allégret's early films noirs - it has all the ingredients of the director's greatest films, but it looks as if Allégret has forgotten the recipe, and so the dish he serves up is nowhere near as palatable as we might have expected.  The one missing ingredient is Jacques Sigurd, the screenwriter who contributed to all of the director's best films.  Instead, we he have a collaborative effort between Yves Allégret, Maurice Aubergé and Frédéric Dard that looks like a half-hearted reworking of Allégret's earlier Les Miracles n'ont lieu qu'une fois (1951), and it is a pale substitute for what Sigurd may have come up with.  The characters are little more than familiar noir stereotypes, the plot is riddled with hard-to-stomach contrivances, and the ending too forced, too artificial, too predictable to be taken seriously.  Allégret's direction lacks the force and poetry it once had, and even though there are some remarkable performances from Gélin and Knef, the film fails to gel into a coherent, satisfying whole.  The air of sadness that permeates La Fille de Hambourg is perhaps Yves Allégret's realisation that he will never again make a great film.

Film Synopsis

During WWII, Pierre Louviers is a prisoner-of-war and his only consolation as he toils at the port of Hamburg is the comforting regard of a young German woman, Maria.  Fifteen years later, Pierre returns to Hamburg with his friends Georges and Jean-Marie, looking for some amusement during a night's stopover in the now totally reconstructed port.  Exploring the red light district, Pierre is surprised to come face-to-face with Maria, who is employed as a nightclub hostess.  At first, Maria is reluctant to begin an affair with Pierre, but the lure of love proves too strong for either of them to resist...