Une Si Jolie Petite Plage

A late bloom for the Carné-Prévert brand of poetic realism, set in a wintry beach resort in Normandy where a young man (Philipe), returns to the scene of his childhood after involvement in a crime of passion in Paris (he has just killed the singer he was seduced by and ran away with to escape his orphanage background). Undergoing much soul-searching torment, focused by the presence of a sinister stranger (Servais) as well as by speculation and gossip about the crime centering on the nosy hotel proprietress (Marken), he finds some temporary warmth in the love of the bedraggled chambermaid (Robinson). An exercise in unrelieved gloom, much admired at the time, it now looks much too studied; despite sound performances and Henri Alekan's impressively moody evocation of the deserted, permanently rain-swept landscape, it emerges as rather a bore.