When the movie was broadcast for the first time on French TV ,it was shown with a thing of the past ,the "carré blanc" (=white square" )on the low right of the picture,which meant that the work was strictly reserved for adults ;today,it would not scandalize a nun.
Which is not to say the movie is bad ;time has passed since and we've seen worse!Claude Autant-Lara was one of the best French directors of all time and progressive at that ;Colette was a feminist writer ,ahead of her time ,whose books were often transferred to the screen by feminist director Jacqueline Audry ,the only woman directing in the pre-Varda days :and like it or not ,Autant-Lara and Audry were more feminist than Varda( see "Le Bonheur" for that matter) :In "La Garçonne ",Audry depicted what one should call a playgirl (in the fifties) ; in "Le Blé En Herbe ",Colette reverses the roles : the still majestic Edwige Feuillère uses Philippe like as a sex object : when she leaves him ,she tells him so :"you'll be a nice vacation souvenir".No more ,no less; people frightened of the rising woman power -which was to blossom in the late sixties- depicted the movie as the initiation of a young virgin lad ... A woman such as Madame Dallery made her way through the fifties thriumphantly , with a whiff of scandal (what she does was only allowed to men at the time);the Office catholique Du Cinema made no mistake when they forbade this "trash " to their flock.
And it had just begun :in the sixties ,Autant -Lara devoted two movies to abortion (still illegal in the French mid-sixties).
A note about the young actors : Pierre-Michel Beck's career was short-lived,but Nicole Berger carried on with her career through the sixties when she was killed in a car crash;
Which is not to say the movie is bad ;time has passed since and we've seen worse!Claude Autant-Lara was one of the best French directors of all time and progressive at that ;Colette was a feminist writer ,ahead of her time ,whose books were often transferred to the screen by feminist director Jacqueline Audry ,the only woman directing in the pre-Varda days :and like it or not ,Autant-Lara and Audry were more feminist than Varda( see "Le Bonheur" for that matter) :In "La Garçonne ",Audry depicted what one should call a playgirl (in the fifties) ; in "Le Blé En Herbe ",Colette reverses the roles : the still majestic Edwige Feuillère uses Philippe like as a sex object : when she leaves him ,she tells him so :"you'll be a nice vacation souvenir".No more ,no less; people frightened of the rising woman power -which was to blossom in the late sixties- depicted the movie as the initiation of a young virgin lad ... A woman such as Madame Dallery made her way through the fifties thriumphantly , with a whiff of scandal (what she does was only allowed to men at the time);the Office catholique Du Cinema made no mistake when they forbade this "trash " to their flock.
And it had just begun :in the sixties ,Autant -Lara devoted two movies to abortion (still illegal in the French mid-sixties).
A note about the young actors : Pierre-Michel Beck's career was short-lived,but Nicole Berger carried on with her career through the sixties when she was killed in a car crash;