French Import

Devil in the Flesh (Graetz; A.F.E.), when it first appeared in France a couple of years ago, caused the devil of a row. Like the celebrated autobiographical novel on which it was based,* it was rough on French national dignity (the municipal council of Bordeaux denounced it as "shocking, painful and scabrous") but enthusiastically received by the public (it ran to packed houses for more than a year).

All this Gallic fuss was stirred up by a simple enough story. Lycee Student Franc,ois Jaubert (Gerard Philipe), too young to take part in World War I, falls passionately in love with Marthe Grangier (Micheline Presle). The devil in Franc,ois' flesh is more than adolescent sex; it is also a blind adolescent ego, full of the power to hurt. Half-man and half-child, Franc,ois mockingly helps Marthe select the furniture for the home she is to share with her husband, who is fighting at the front. Then he moves in to help her use it. When Marthe refuses to continue writing to her husband, Franc,ois, though tormented by jealousy, insists on dictating her weekly letters. Caught up in their infatuation, the lovers defy the protests of their parents and friends. For them the war is a precious parenthesis. When it does come to an end, Marthe dies giving birth to a son. Her suffering and death also give birth -- too late -- to Franc,ois, the man.

Devil in the Flesh is a profoundly moving film because it is profoundly honest. With an ear for dialogue as accurate and intimate as a wire recorder in a bedroom, Writers Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost (who also collaborated on Symphonie Pastorale) have provided a script that is at once ruthless, compassionate and quietly penetrating. Working in the same low natural key, Director Claude Autant Lara has produced an extraordinary fluoroscopic effect of life-in-depth. The lovers' moments of clandestine passion (as frank as any that have recently reached the screen), their childish gaiety, their anguish and fears have an almost unbearable intimacy. Sensitively conceived and superbly acted--notably by Micheline Presle and Gerard Philipe--Devil makes most cinema explorations of the human heart appear strictly two-dimensional.

* Le Diable au Corps by Raymond Radiguet, a precocious protege of Jean Cocteau, who began it in 1920 when he was 17, published it in 1923, the year he died.

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