'Life's a bitch.' ~ Pierre (Gérard Philipe)

After the war the French could turn their tastes towards darker subjects, having endured years under the creatively stifling Nazi occupation where light comedies or period pieces were the actual order of the day. This coincided with a certain tendency in American cinema resulting in films that flooded French screens after the Nazi bans that had kept them out for years evaporated with the German defeat. The French noticed that this new wave of American and British films were darker than the pre-war entertainments they were used to and a couple of French critics christened this trend Film Noir. It didn’t take long for the French to say – ‘I see your noir and I raise you,’ the upshot of which was a line of bleak existentialist French films that travelled back to the USA, the cinematic equivalent of sending pitch black coals to Newcastle. The masterful Such A Pretty Little Beach from Yves Allégret remains one of the blackest.

Pierre (Gérard Philipe) returns on a rainy night to a small seaside town and takes a room at the only hotel open in the winter season. He seems withdrawn and keeps to himself until another man arrives from Paris, Fred (Jean Servais), who starts asking questions about Pierre. Pierre tries to befriend an orphan boy (Christian Ferry) who was taken in by the hotel owner Mme. Mahieu (Jane Marken) who mistreats him. The hotel maid Marthe (Madeleine Robinson) strikes up a friendship with Pierre while Fred prods the orphan boy for information. Soon the truth about the reason for Pierre’s visit is revealed.

In the post war recovery of French cinema, Yves Allégret had taken up the baton of the Poetic Realism masters of the 1930s and continued to work tales of bleakness and cynicism that sat firmly in that tradition. In 1949 he was in a rich vein of form, having made the excellent of Dédée of Antwerp starring his then wife Simone Signoret, and he would follow Such a Pretty Little Beach with the brilliant Manèges, also starring Signoret. All three were written by Jacques Sigurd, a close friend and former flatmate of Gérard Philipe, who as an actor was discovered by the director Marc Allégret, the brother of Yves Allégret. Yves had served as assistant to Marc as well as to Jean Renoir for A Day In The Country but came into his own as a director after the war and before the Nouvelle Vague cohort changed everything.

In 1949 the French were coping with the national psychic wrench of the fallout from the war as embodied by Mme. Mahieu who scratches out a living looking for opportunity around every corner. When a customer proposes a racetrack to draw customers she wants a sanitorium for sick people like Pierre, ‘Sick people have visitors’ she reasons. Her cynicism extends to the arrangement to house a ‘charity boy’ (a government scheme to look after wards of the state), and to use and abuse his labour. She complains to Pierre about the mixed race orphan and having to keep a constant eye on him, ‘They’re born rotten, the wages of sin…’ but she rationalizes having him there because he’s ‘Cheaper than a maid.’ It soon transpires that Pierre is not there for the fresh air and that the oft heard refrain ‘such a pretty little beach’ is deathly ironic.

Such a Pretty Little Beach unfolds in its own time – the European pacing in set up and exposition very much against the turbo charged American crime films of the period. This allows the intrigue and tension to build as Allégret gives us piecemeal information – Why is Pierre so haunted? Why did the incapacitated old man in the hotel react to him? Why was the song playing on the record such a trigger for Pierre? What does Fred want from Pierre? Allégret builds the suspense at each move, underpinned by the atmospheric setting of a wintry beach and the constant rain and the dour, ominous mood it creates.

The threads slowly come together and Allégret captures in a compositional frame yesterday, today and tomorrow with old man, Gerard and orphan boy as sentimental ballad plays on record, teasing a connection that is still beyond reach. Fred is a piece in that puzzle, who tries to corrupt the boy in disturbing ways with sexual allusions present before we know that the boy is taking the older woman guest to a shed to copulate. Once Fred knows he asks the orphan – ‘Does she compensate you?’ When the boy signals in the negative Fred shrugs and replies, ‘Can’t even rely on bourgeoise for that!’ He then tells the boy a lesson for life, ‘Love doesn’t exist – remember that and take advantage.’ Such a cold, bleak beach.

Allégret injects some touching scenes with Pierre’s attempts to connect with the boy. The boy comes across Pierre in a beach hideout, an old fort in the dunes, but Pierre’s attempts to talk to the boy end badly. Eventually Pierre tells the boy that he too worked the same shitty jobs as an orphan but was taken away to Paris by the famous singer, lamenting that he suffered ‘Five years of filth’ at her hands. Pierre is crestfallen when the boys response is ‘So you really had her the old bitch!’ It is the heartbreaking moment Pierre knows how beyond help the boy is and how futile his attempts have been. Marthe is the only ray of light for Pierre as the two lost souls connect – Marthe tells him, ‘I’m sick of it but you have to carry on.’ She sees his weariness as he weeps and gently says, ‘Men can cry too’ and he replies, ‘I’m done for.’

The final reveal is that Pierre was once an orphan at the hotel and the voice of the woman singer was the woman who was murdered in Paris – the same singer who took him away and used him as a toy boy. The old man recognised Pierre but is unable to communicate as much to his daughter and Fred was part of the singer’s poisonous inner circle chasing the dead woman’s fortune in jewels. Fred is haunted by her ghost as much as Pierre, ‘She’s worse more dead than alive.’ Fred’s betrayal is as predictable as the rain but Marthe vainly attempts to spirit Pierre out of town before the police arrive to arrest him. The ending is as sad and bleak as the life Pierre has led.

Gérard Philipe is superb as Pierre and makes a sympathetic murderer, haunted and lost in a sea of confusion. Madeleine Robinson and Jean Servais offer excellent support but special mention for the wonderful Jane Marken, a brilliant and versatile actress and an Allégret favourite who inhabits the grasping hotel owner perfectly. The immortal Julien Carette (La Grande Illusion) is as reliable as ever as the sad travelling salesman trying to make sense of the sacrifices he makes by being on the road. One reason the film evokes the Poetic Realism period is the cinematographer, Henri Alekan, who was a camera operator for Carné’s Port of Shadows. He also worked with Rene Clement, Julien Duvivier, Jean Cocteau and shot Roman Holiday for William Wyler.  

The director/writer partnership between Yves Allégret and Jacques Sigurd extended to a run of six films and a contribution from Sigurd on a seventh. It remains one of the most significant creative collaborations in all of French cinema given the quality of most of the output, especially the first three which represents a brilliant trilogy of a Dark Futility of Love. Their collaboration in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s represents a stunning return to the territory of Poetic Realism before the Nouvelle Vague took hold and many directors and writers found themselves out in the cold. Ironically, the final and stunning shot of the beach in the film can’t help but provoke comparisons to Truffaut’s brutal still frame in 400 Blows, which it precedes by a decade. With Such A Pretty Beach, Allégret made a masterpiece that sits comfortably next to any film from the era, and a bleak, existentialist mood piece to treasure for all time.