Well, first off, let's get straight which film this is, since there are several with the name Devil in the Flesh. This is not the 1998 American crime thriller starring Rose McGowan. Nor is it the 1986 Italian Romance, directed by Marco Bellocchio and starring Maruschka Detmers, although that film was a remake of the one here under review. The present film is a 1946 French film, originally released as Le Diable au Corps, directed by Claude Autant-Lara.

Historical Background: Claude Autant-Lara was born in 1903 in Luzarches, France and died in 2000. He was the son of an architect, Edouard Autant, and an actress, Louise Lara. Lara was an outspoken pacifist and spent most of the World War I years in London with her son. Claude returned to France when he was sixteen to study art. He worked for several years as a set decorator and costume designer. He made his first short in 1923 and his first feature in 1933. It wasn't until the forties that he directed films of noteworthy quality, including Le Marriage de Chiffon (1942), Lettres d'Amour (1942), and Le Diable au Corps (1947). Autant-Lara was a leftist and an atheist and enjoyed tweaking the noses of the French censors with his attacks on the military, the Catholic Church, and the bourgeoisie. The Devil in the Flesh was considered scandalous when it was first released. It was banned in France and Canada and the New York state censors cut some scenes before it could be shown in that state. It's hard to see now why there was such a fuss. The film is not only inoffensive but rather boring. Autant-Lara's oeuvre was later linked to the so-called "cinema de papa" that Truffaut and others lambasted and against which the French New Wave rebelled. Autant-Lara worked repeatedly with the same small group of colleagues, such as writers Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, composer René Cloërec, and cinematographers Jacques Natteau and, for the present film, Michel Kebler.

The Story: The film begins at the time of the armistice, in 1918, as World I is coming to an end. During the noisy celebration, a schoolboy, François Jaubert (Gérard Philipe) recalls, via flashbacks, his affair during the war with an older woman, Marthe Grangier (Micheline Presle). They had met when François was just sixteen and Marthe in her late twenties. Marthe was engaged, at the time, to a soldier named Jack. François and Marthe fall madly in love, for no apparent reason other than basic chemistry. After François fails to show up for an appointment to run away together, Marthe goes ahead and marries her soldier. Later, François and Marthe reconnect and begin a torrid love affair, while Jack is away at the front. After François's first night in bed with Marthe, he declares, "They say the roosters only crow in the morning. It's a big lie. They crow all night." Later, François falls asleep as the lovers row around a lovely lake and an observant woman declares to her husband, "No one can keep going night and day."

François becomes increasingly possessive and jealous that Marthe is married. To prove her love, Marthe offers to let François read the letters from her husband and, when he refuses, tosses them in the fire. She also skillfully points out, "If I weren't married, you wouldn't be here. I'd be at my mother's." French logic at work, there! Get married so you can have affairs!

The lovers vacillate back and forth between running away together and splitting up. Jack passes through town on a troupe train, but Marthe opts not to go to the station for the brief rendezvous that could have been afforded. Later, Marthe informs François that she is pregnant with his child. Sometimes, however, she declares that she has two children, since the seventeen-year-old François is often incapable of acting like an adult. Predictably, the romance ends in tragedy, the exact nature of which I'll leave for readers to discover on their own, should any choose to see this film.

Themes: It's hard to identify any real theme, in this film, other than the inevitability that a romance between an older married woman and a teenage boy, based on nothing more than mutual lust, is bound to come to naught but trouble. Add in the circumstances of the illicit pregnancy and a husband fighting on the front, and the situation is fraught with tragic potential.

Production Values: The script feels like it was written by an eighteen-year-old. It wasn't, but it was adapted from a semi-autobiographical novel written by an eighteen-year-old, Raymond Radiguet. Radiguet died two years later of typhoid fever. The two lead characters are never more than shallow archetypes: a hormonal teenage boy and an attractive but lonely older woman. It's never evident what either one sees in the other beyond pure carnal desire. They are given no personalities.

The best thing about the film is its atmosphere. The sets are elaborate and impressive in their period detail. Michel Kleber provided lots of rainy or misty days, giving the film an ethereal quality. There're some artistic shots and interesting camera angles. The music by René Cloërec is very romantic and would have worked had the love story itself been more profound and moving. As it is, the music feels overblown. The VHS copy that I purchased is very poor quality, both for the video and the audio. The film available in America is also dubbed rather than subtitles, so the poor sound quality is a major deficit.

I sought out this film on the basis of one sourcebook rating it at 4-stars (our of 5 possible) and, most especially, from a desire to see Micheline Presle in her heyday. I had enjoyed her work at a later stage of her career in The King of Hearts (1966), one of my all-time favorite films. Presle gives a nice performance, but her character is so shallow that I had no sense of experiencing anything of her beyond her surface beauty. Although Gérard Philipe went on to be a popular romantic lead in France, until his untimely death at just thirty-nine, his casting here at age twenty-four as a seventeen-year-old destroys the credibility of the story. Although Philipe manages to convey the lack of depth and immaturity of a smitten seventeen-year-old, he never looks less than his real age. Since a significant part of the story's point was the mismatch in ages of the lovers, the casting mishap is a major deficit for the film. Philipe later appeared in La Ronde (1950). I thought the best performance in the film belonged to Jean Debucourt, in a small role as François's father. His other work included Mayerling (1936) and The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953).

Bottom-Line: Other than seeing Micheline Presle, I got no satisfaction from this film whatsoever. The story was just not engaging because the characters are given no depth or personality and the age difference is never convincing. The video and audio quality is woeful and the dubbing into English is bad. Only the sets and the camerawork are noteworthy. Until and unless this film is released in a restored version on DVD, with subtitles, don't bother with it. Even then, I can't imagine I'd give this film more than 3-stars for its rather shallow and overblown romantic drama. The running time is an interminable 110 minutes.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age