Word: gallic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...further chosen to emphasize the revengeful desires of Abigail Williams, a seventeen-year-old vixen who, after being seduced by Proctor, plots to have his wife hanged as a witch in order to take her place as mistress of the Proctor farm. Naturally then, there are some typically Gallic seduction scenes that are only implied in the play. The blatant lust of Abigail, brilliantly and demonically played by Mylene Demongeot, completely erases the more insidious evil of the original character...
...shoulder and arms curved in a possessive embrace; in the upbeat La Marie-Vison, about the perils of coveting a mink coat ("There must be other ways for a girl to keep warm"), he expressed the wisdom of the cafes in the lift of an eyebrow, the cynical, gallic turn of a wrist...
...rest is one long cuckold-doodle-do. The husband explains by flashbacks how he secretly learned of the infidelity and how he reacted with something more than a Gallic shrug. His grandfather might have shot, whipped or choked the villain straightway. But a man of the husband's generation intends no violence. Instead, he wants to stretch the lovers on a psychological rack, then leave the actor there and reclaim his wife. As a starter, he hires a private detective to make keyhole photographs. For divorce proceedings? "Mais non. For the family album...
Though the director has caught some visual excitement in Paris, his camera is mostly cold and apathetic. But the pic ture is blessed with urbane Gallic polish, some satiric set pieces, and another en gaging performance by Actor Gabin, who at 55 is still the No. 1 male box-office draw of French films...
France took on this unpromising territory largely by happenstance. When Britain in 1890 agreed to concede France a free hand in the Sahara, Lord Salisbury commented: "Let the Gallic cock sharpen his spurs in the desert sand." But for nearly half a century virtually the only Frenchmen to show much interest in the desert sands were adventurers and eccentrics. Tindouf, now one of the French army's most important Sahara outposts, was not occupied until 1934, and the last of the marauding desert bands was not brought under control until...