LA P... RESPECTUEUSE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 912, 1 February 1957, Page 21

LA P... RESPECTUEUSE

(Films Agiman-Artes Film) R: over 16 only SO often haven't been shocked or (worse) excited by movie scenes that I've been told should have that effect, that I sometimes stop to wonder wiry. There were Grace Kelly’s kisses in Rear Window, for example; and now I see that some "open-mouthed" kissing has been cut from the new Elia Kazan film Baby Doll. I bare my troubled conscience this week because a friend had assured me that La P. . . Respectueuse (The Respectable Prostitute) was salacious. Undoubtedly it’s unsuitable for children, and quite properly it has a restricted certificate; but for a film based on a serious play that’s set entirely in @ prostitute’s room it seems to’ me to go no further than you might expect: what it adds to the play visually is probably no more inflammatory than some of the dialogue it leaves out. No doubt a puritan background (or the lack of it) will often make all the difference to judgment on these matters. Whatever their own views, censors (and others in that position) must, I suppose, assume that most people in this country have such e background and will be shocked or excited by certain movie scenes. I can see why, but I think it’s a pity. It would be even more a pity if reviewers felt bound to write as if they shared that background. Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Respectable Prostitute has an odd subject for a French play-the colour question in the American Deep South. An unoffending Negro has been killed by a senator’s ‘drunken nephew. The senator’s son spends a night with a witness, a young prostitute, then tries to bribe her to allege that the dead man and his companion tried to rape her. Where bribery fails, the double talk of the senator himself (Marcel Herrand) succeeds, and the girl signs the allegation. It’s a fantastic situation, but not more so than. the sort of thing we hear of from American sources. Here it would be more convincing if less emphatically stated and if the dialogue were not in French. Even so I found the film held my disbelief suspended well enough from around the time M. Sartre’s play takes over. The earlier scenes which translate into action what the play tells in dialogue are less satisfactory and portray a_ different Lizzie from "the respectable prostitute." In this later, better part of the film Barbara Laage gives something like the performance I expected from her. The play ends on a very cynical note: after Lizzie has sheltered the other Negro, sexual attraction between her and the senator’s son triumphs when, fatally drawn, he returns to claim her as his mistress. I can’t imagine what M. Sartre thinks of the film’s more idealistic and hopeful ending. I shan’t reveal it, but it surprised me a little since some effort had been made in the characterisation to soften us up for the ending the playwright intended. Still, you will find this film interesting with many scenes very well done and some especially well photographed.