"... avec une mirepoix aillée au sang du coq, garniture de petits oignons glacés, de lardons, de champignons, fleurons en losange, accompagné de pommes rissolées persillées, farcies au foie gras du Périgord"
Such is Chef Chatelin's (Gabin) signature dish, which he proudly prepares for his newlywed young wife (Delorme), as a follow-up to a starter of "lightweight" quenelles, nothing less.
This stands as a good metaphor for the whole movie. Such a dish would have been a proud feature of a posh French restaurant 60 years ago, nowadays it is a dated relic, a stodgy hodge-podge of competently-assembled noble individual elements, which put together make for an rather uninteresting and indigestible whole.
Delorme plays a young-woman with an angel face, who soon reveals herself to be a cold-hearted, scheming monster. This was a familiar trope of the 1930s-40s movies, and a theme Duvivier used in previous works ("La belle équipe", "Panique"). By 1956 this was already a somewhat tired routine, and one cannot help feeling the movie is definitely misogynistic: all women are either mothers or monsters (or both).
The male characters do not fare much better: both leads (Gabin and Blain) are well-intentioned but exceedingly gullible. The customers of Chatelin's restaurants are not likable either, with a particular mention to the rich old guy who comes each time with a different, much younger and obviously venal, mistress - and to whom Chatelin unaccountably turns to when in need of matrimonial advice.
The movie nevertheless has its good moments: the scenes with the two mothers, each a horrible person in her own kind, who Duvivier portrays in gleeful manner (with her disheveled look and bulbous eyes, Lucienne Bogaert eerily evokes Andy Serkis' Gollum). There is also an interesting depiction of the now-vanished Paris les Halles district. And the acting is top-notch, Gabin still in top form, Delorme well-cast even if her dramatic range appears somewhat limited at times. Only Blain feels wooden, but his role is pretty one-dimensional.
All in all a watchable noir movie, but Duvivier did better in the past, and there is something stale about the movie's perspective on human relationships. Not because it's misanthropic, but because it's a petit-bourgeois kind of misanthropy.
This stands as a good metaphor for the whole movie. Such a dish would have been a proud feature of a posh French restaurant 60 years ago, nowadays it is a dated relic, a stodgy hodge-podge of competently-assembled noble individual elements, which put together make for an rather uninteresting and indigestible whole.
Delorme plays a young-woman with an angel face, who soon reveals herself to be a cold-hearted, scheming monster. This was a familiar trope of the 1930s-40s movies, and a theme Duvivier used in previous works ("La belle équipe", "Panique"). By 1956 this was already a somewhat tired routine, and one cannot help feeling the movie is definitely misogynistic: all women are either mothers or monsters (or both).
The male characters do not fare much better: both leads (Gabin and Blain) are well-intentioned but exceedingly gullible. The customers of Chatelin's restaurants are not likable either, with a particular mention to the rich old guy who comes each time with a different, much younger and obviously venal, mistress - and to whom Chatelin unaccountably turns to when in need of matrimonial advice.
The movie nevertheless has its good moments: the scenes with the two mothers, each a horrible person in her own kind, who Duvivier portrays in gleeful manner (with her disheveled look and bulbous eyes, Lucienne Bogaert eerily evokes Andy Serkis' Gollum). There is also an interesting depiction of the now-vanished Paris les Halles district. And the acting is top-notch, Gabin still in top form, Delorme well-cast even if her dramatic range appears somewhat limited at times. Only Blain feels wooden, but his role is pretty one-dimensional.
All in all a watchable noir movie, but Duvivier did better in the past, and there is something stale about the movie's perspective on human relationships. Not because it's misanthropic, but because it's a petit-bourgeois kind of misanthropy.