Le Fruit défendu (1952)
Directed by Henri Verneuil

Film Review

This early film from Henri Verneuil is one of many fruitful collaborations involving the director and the great French comic actor Fernandel.   The film, in many ways a conventional early 1950s melodrama, sees Fernandel playing one of his rare straight roles, on this occasion opposite the up-and-coming starlet Françoise Arnoul.

Whilst the film has a certain charm and is generally well directed and scripted,  it doesn't really exploit the full dramatic impact and poignancy of its subject.  This is partly down to Fernandel's overly restrained performance, which lacks conviction and depth, and partly because of the absence of any real chemistry between the two leading actors.  Despite this, the film manages to hold the audience's attention, partly because of the imaginative photography but mainly because of Françoise Arnoul's delightfully seductive performance.

Film Synopsis

As he marks his 45th birthday at a dinner party with his nearest and dearest Charles Pellegrin appears to be the very model of middle-class respectability.  Happily settled in Arles, he carries out his professional duties as a doctor with admirable care and diligence.  Only he knows what a scurrilous double life he has been leading these past few years.  It all began five years ago, not long after he took over his current practice.  This was when he married Armande, the niece of another respected medical man, but it was not to be a happy union.  A cold and controlling woman by nature, Armande was not the wife Charles had wished for himself and the marriage soon turned sour.

It was in Martine, a much younger woman, that Charles found the passion he so badly needed.  Charles discovered this frivolous beauty during one of his routine trips to Marseille, and he became her willing slave as soon as their eyes met.  Despite her low moral standards and the fact she was the doctor's junior by more than twenty years, Martine was everything Charles craved, an oasis of warmth for an unhappy man lost in the cold wastes of a loveless marriage.  To save his mistress from another man of dubious reputation, Charles took her under his wing, giving her work and a place to live.

Armande was bound to find out about her husband's clandestine love affair sooner or later, and when she did she preferred to keep the matter to herself, to avoid a scandal.  All too soon, Martine became tired of her lacklustre life in this dull little town.  In the end, she made up her mind to leave her lover and head for Paris, in search of the high life.  Unable to give up the woman to whom he was now devotedly attached, Charles felt he had no choice but to go with her...