DEVIL IN THE FLESH.
(Paul Graetz) T will encourage no one to rely on my barometer when I say that From Here to Eternity might have got top grading this week if I hadn’t seen Devil in the Flesh. The difference is between a very good film and a near-flawless one. Diable au Corps-to go back to the original French-was made about six years ago but hasn’t been seen in New Zealand before (which doesn’t say much for us). It is the story of the love of a boy of 16 and a married woman of 20 whose husband is away at the First World War; and if you think that sounds an unlikely subject-well, the French have a way with these things and I can only say that for Gérard Philippe and Micheline Presle acting seems a clumsy word. \ Diable au Corps captures adolescence -the brash confidence, tenderness, jealousy and misery, the confused relapses from independence into dependence, the slow-dawning realisation that even requited love can be terrible as well as beautiful. It is superbly directed (by Claude Autant-Lara) and _ superbly photographed, and its love scenes are amongst the most tender I have seen. In fact, apart from the dubbed-in dialogue there is nothing about Diable au Corps for which I haven’t the highest praise. The film never suggests that adultery pays, and if there are some who nevertheless condemn its sympathetic treatment of an illicit love, let me say, quite humbly, that I am sorry for them,
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19540326.2.32.1.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 766, 26 March 1954, Page 17
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249DEVIL IN THE FLESH. New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 766, 26 March 1954, Page 17
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