Asfalto

At the time ,screenwriter Jacques Sigurd was a spent force : " dédée d'anvers" "une si jolie petite plage " and "manèges" seemed very far away ; "cargaison blanche" ,"du mouron pour les petits oiseaux " and the ridiculous "constance aux enfers" or worse "le désert de Pigalle " were hollow echoes of a brilliant past.

And Hervé Bromberger ,who gave two interesting movies about the lost generation of the fifties ("les fruits sauvages" "les loups dans la bergerie" ) ,gets lost in this poor story of a working class girl turned bourgeoise via marriage and ,for a while takes a walk on the wild side where she meets again her old pals ,one of whom accidently commits a murder .Nicole (Françoise Arnoul ) is not really involved in the yarn and she looks like a tourist coming to see the milieu in which she was nurtured ;one may think , anyway,that the ending is distastefully bourgeois .

This is a slow-moving flick,something like "the NV visits the young louts "; except for Marcel Bozzuffi , whom one rarely sees young,and who was to become a strong supporting actor, the rest of the young actors quickly sank into oblivion: Jean-François Poron (part of the cast of " les loups dans la bergerie" and future duke of Nemours in "la princesse de Clèves" ) and Jean-Paul Vignon who went to work in America (his wish ,but Charles Boyer's and Louis Jourdan's reality).Roger dumas ,in spite of his youthful looks, is the most endearing.

Needless to say,Massimo Girotti is wasted .