En cas de malheur [Love Is My Profession] **** (1958, Jean Gabin, Brigitte Bardot, Edwige Feuillère, Franco Interlenghi) – Classic Movie Review 12,297

When Jean Gabin met Brigitte Bardot: the beautiful 1958 French romantic drama film En cas de malheur [Love Is My Profession]. 

Director Claude Autant-Lara’s rather beautiful 1958 French romantic drama film En cas de malheur [Love Is My Profession] stars Jean Gabin, Brigitte Bardot and Edwige Feuillère. The screenplay by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost is based on the novel In Case of Emergency by Georges Simenon. There are crime and thriller elements, but those expecting a thriller will be sorely disappointed. It is longish but compelling. It takes us on a tragedy-tinged emotional journey, on the road to where exactly? The road to ruin. The road to nowhere.

Jean Gabin stars as André Gobillot, a leading middle-aged Parisian married lawyer who takes on the case of an attractive 22-year-old petty criminal, Yvette (Brigitte Bardot), who has been caught by police after robbing a watchmaker’s shop with a toy pistol and bashing his old wife on the head. Yvette has no money but just her looks to offer him. He gets her acquitted on a false alibi by a friendly barman, and then installs her in a small hotel. Gobillot has to get her off drink and drugs, and an improbable affair begins, as he becomes increasingly obsessed with her. But she is still entertaining her wildly jealous current lover, poor medical student and factory worker Mazetti (Franco Interlenghi). Then she gets pregnant, and he imagines they could have a life together and start a family.

Edwige Feuillère plays Gobillo’s elegant childless wife Viviane, who realises what is happening but hopes the affair will not last. Instead Gobillot’s obsession grows, and an enquiry is opened into the false witness.

The cast is ideal. Gabin is perfect as André Gobillot, a calm and collected sufferer of amour fou. It is good to see him in this role after so many films as gangsters and cops, though they are his true territory. Bardot could hardly fit the part, kittenish, excitably sexy but annoying and capricious. Gabin and Bardot do share screen chemistry, the right chemistry for the film, though it is hardly surprising that he out-classes her by a long way in the acting stakes. Bardot is effective none the less and so is Feuillère is an unforgiving role as the passive wife who tries to get by through sitting and waiting it out. Interlenghi’s role is unforgiving too, and is effective too. Two other performances shine out, Nicole Berger as Yvette’s live-in maid Janine, and Madeleine Barbulée as Gobillo’s secretary Bordenave.

Claude Autant-Lara crafts an old-style French movie just when the new-style French movie was coming in. En cas de malheur is pretty much the end of an era, but it was a great era, and the film is a good one, very solidly carpentered, persuasive and moving, with just a touch of the old poetic realism. The screenplay is quite subtle. What’s it all about? Like Yvette’s character, it can’t be pinned down to anything. Just when you think you have got it, it slips away. It is intangible. You believe in it, it is kind of real but it is artificial at the same life. It is not hard to identify with the Gabin character, but he is such an idiot he is at least as annoying as Bardot. It is certainly a story that keeps you guessing where it’s headed, and the film is partly compelling just for that. The ending’s something of a surprise, a shock even.

Particularly interesting are the scenes on the TV of Queen Elizabeth II’s state visit to Paris on the day of Yvette’s robbery, and the sequence where Mazetti slashes Yvette’s clothes. It hard to be sure why the Queen’s visit is significant, but it adds a lot of colour and interest to that part of the film. Maybe it is just there to contrast Yvette’s poverty and desperate lifestyle with the Queen’s riches and life of luxury.

Surprisingly, and generously, François Truffaut liked it: ‘We come out of it with a mixture of disgust and admiration, a sense of satisfaction that is real enough but incomplete. It is 100 per cent French, with all the virtues and vices that implies: an analysis that is at once subtle and narrow, a skill that is mixed with spitefulness, a spirit of unflinching observation directed at the sordid, and talented sleight-of hand that delivers a liberal message in the end.’

He liked Bardot too: ‘It’s the girl who interests us and preoccupies us. En Cas des Malheur is her best film since And God Created Woman – an anti-Sabrina, anti-Roman Holiday, anti-Anastasia movie that is truly republican.’

The cast are Jean Gabin as Maître André Gobillo, Brigitte Bardot as Yvette Maudet, Edwige Feuillère as Viviane Gobillot, Nicole Berger as Yvette’s maid Janine, Franco Interlenghi as Mazetti, Madeleine Barbulée as Gobillo’s secretary Bordenave, Gabrielle Fontan as Mme Langlois, Jacques Clancy as Duret, Annick Allières as Yvette’s friend Noémie.

The film was released in France on 17 September 1958, and became the year’s 13th most popular film there. With the Gabin / Bardot pairing, and a little light loving and nudity, you’d have thought it might have been an even greater success. Too serious a work, too old style, maybe.

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 12,297

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