Les clandestines

The first reviewer , an old French cinema connoisseur,is right ;the early Raoul André efforts are quite watchable ("fiacre 13" "marchande d'illusions" ) ;it's only in the second half of the fifties that things begin to deteriorate and that his last "works "such " le bourgeois gentil mec " hit rock bottom.

"Les Clandestines ",although its subject is as old as the hill (the call girls ring, drug-trafficking ,heroin, cocaine,you name it......)features a rather inventive screenplay .

A young man ,just out of clink ,finds his grand father ,an assistant director, dead (he hung himself) and wants to see right through this suicide .A girl ,a model ,gets fired and ,badly advised by a so called friend, contemplates deluxe prostitution.

Both these plots seem parallel ,and the way the screenwriters link them together is rather smart ,in this kind of movie. The good lawyer's wife photograph in the infamous album is a good trick.

Philippe Lemaire , one of the romantic young leads of the French fifties , portrays the naive young lad ,forced to fight a gang of procurers ; private joke :when the young guy fights an evil chauffeur , one can hear a song by Lemaire's real life wife , Juliette Gréco ("on dira" =people will say" )

Maria Mauban ,cast against type, is a madam ,the forerunner of "Madame Claude " , who hides her shady business behind the respectable job of a secondhand bookseller , searching valuable editions of Marcel Proust for men ,who are also fond of petites femmes. Nicole Courcel ,short of the readies, will be her new (and last) prey .

Humor is welcome: when the old fogey , a bouquet in his hand ,comes to the tryst ,he finds the whole household on the landing,much to madam's dismay.

Watch out for louis Jourdan's and Claude Dauphin 's very brief appearance .