Le Septième commandement (1957)
Directed by Raymond Bernard

Film Review

Immediately after their happy collaboration on Les Fruits de l'été (1955), director Raymond Bernard and his leading lady Edwige Feuillère teamed up for another lively comedy, Le Septième commandement, the last of five films on which they worked together.  The Bernard-Feuillère partnership began two decades earlier with the popular spy thriller Marthe Richard, au service de la France (1937) and served them both well with a string of box office hits.  By the late 1950s, Raymond Bernard was far from being the cinematic innovator of his early years, but he still had the knack of making films the French cinema-going public wanted to see.

Anyone familiar with Bernard's early work - his silent masterpieces Le Miracle des loups (1924) and Le Joueur d'échecs (1927), or his epic Les Misérables (1934) - will find it hard to accept that such lowbrow fare as Le Septième commandement could be the work of the same man.  Now in his mid-sixties and close to retirement, Bernard was clearly far more interested in entertaining his audience than impressing his critics, and who can blame him?  The two late films that he made as unashamed comedy vehicles for Madame Feuillère are unlikely to win any awards for style or sophistication, but they are effortlessly entertaining and show that the director's penchant for farce never deserted him, even if his artistic flair and originality had long fallen by the wayside.

Le Septième commandement is probably the most derivative of Raymond Bernard's films.  The plot is a virtual rehash of Richard Pottier's L'Aventure commence demain (1948) and the mediocre script is happy to recycle old gags rather than serve up something new.   Not that this in any way diminishes the contribution from its main asset, Edwige Feuillère, who is as enchanting and seductive as ever, despite being as pointless an accessory to a second rate comedy as gold-plating on a pewter tankard.  The film limps along pretty lamely until Jacques Dumesnil shows up and then its fireworks all the way, with Feuillère and her charismatic co-star sparking off each other to such a degree that you'd swear they had both been sitting too near to a Van de Graaff generator before going on set.

As Feuillère's hapless partners in crime, Jacques Morel and Maurice Teynac form an amiable enough double act, their most amusing scene being when they try (and fail) to find a replacement for Feuillère (Micheline Dax clearly isn't up to the job, despite having a pair of legs that seem to go on forever).  The ever-dependable Jeanne Fusier-Gir steals a scene or two as Dumesnil's eccentric elderly aunt, whose accident-prone son is played by none other than Jean Lefebvre, another prominent comic actor with an immense career ahead of him.  In case you are confused by the film's title, in France the Seventh Commandment is 'Thou shall not steal', the joke being that Feuillère and her criminal chums never steal but instead allow their victims to hand over money of their own accord - a kind of tax on gullibility.  After this amiable but fairly undistinguished crowdpleaser, Raymond Bernard bowed out in style with a somewhat more off-kilter (if not to say downright bizarre) comedy offering, Le Septième ciel (1958).

Film Synopsis

Nadia Vronskaïa is a woman whose charms no man can resist, and this is why she is such a successful confidence trickster.  Having found her victim, invariably a wealthy man of a certain age, she plies him with charm and then, once she is certain he has swallowed the bait, she moves in for the kill.  Pretending to be in desperate need of cash, she hands over a valuable jewel to her victim and implores him to sell it for as much as he can get.  As the victim walks away, Nadia's accomplices - Pilou and Labaroche - appear and surreptitiously recover the jewel.  What can the victim do?  Of course he must give Nadia the money she so desperately craves rather than admit that he has carelessly mislaid the jewel.

It is a foolproof scam - at least until Nadia tries it out on Gilbert Odet, a man who is not so easily taken in.  Realising that Gilbert may have seen through her little game, Nadia makes a hasty retreat, but he is waiting for - with a wad of cash and the look of a man who is desperately in love.  Abandoning her accomplices, Nadia decides to turn over a new leaf and start a new life as Gilbert's respectable wife.  But Pilou and Labaroche are harder to get rid of than she had supposed.  Seeing through an attempt by Nadia to stage her arrest and thereby end their criminal association, the two crooks call on her at her new residence, with the intention of collecting their share of the wealth coming to Nadia from her marriage to Gilbert...