Les Compagnes de la nuit (1953)
Directed by Ralph Habib

Film Review

With a ridiculously protracted pre-credits announcement warning us of the social scourge that is prostitution, Les Compagnes de la nuit looks as if it was conceived as either a public information film or a piece of social realist commentary.  In fact, it is neither of these things, but a plodding, and mostly dull, melodrama that would have been dated if it had been made a decade earlier.  Directed by Ralph Habib with no obvious flair or engagement with the subject matter, the film serves up the familiar stack of well-worn clichés and, far from being socially relevant, looks like a third rate pot-boiler that has distinctly gone off the boil.

Raymond Pellegrin is wasted in a role that is the blandest caricature of the kind of low-life part that he was often required to play as his career took a downward slide, and Suzy Prim and Noël Roquevert fair little better.  Louis de Funès shows up briefly in one scene, shamelessly indulging in a spot of scene-stealing during a murder before being swiftly elbowed into the background.  Only Françoise Arnoul comes out of this near-disaster with any dignity, and it is her presence alone that provides the sliver of modernity and realism that the film badly needs.  Stilted and painfully lacking in originality, Les Compagnes de la nuit would have as much life as a week-old corpse without Arnoul's eerily beguiling performance.

Film Synopsis

In 1950s Paris, two events take place which apparently have no connection.  The police are concerned with the corpses of two murdered women.  A short time later, in a café in the capital's red light district, Olga Viterbo has just gunned a man down.  At the police station, Inspector Marechal listens attentively to the distressing confession of a girl who, like so many others, has fallen into prostitution.  It all began when Olga left the reformatory, her luggage including a baby which its father refused to recognized.  When she meets Paul, an honest worker, fortune seems to smile on Olga, as Paul appears keen to take her under his wings.  But then she encounters Jo Verdier and is dazzled by his charming personality.  Before she knows it, Olga has fallen into the clutches of a squalid pimp.  When, after a while, Jo gets himself involved in a murder case, Olga uses this opportunity to sneak away and return to Paul.  But she hasn't heard the last of Jo...