Le château de verre

A luxury hotel in the Swiss Lakes. Evelyne (Michèle Morgan) leaves the dance floor just in time to avoid a particularly undignified dance and to put her holiday lover Rémy (Jean Marais) on the train. Rémy calls her a 'petite fille'. Her husband Laurent (Jean Servais) arrives. Laurent also calls her a 'petite fille'. You talk to me as if I'm a child, she complains. He twigs that something's gone on, and her mate Elena covers up for her.

Evelyne drops a glass and just leaves it smashed on the floor. Does she not know how to use a dustpan and brush? She buries her face in the flowers Rémy sends.

What are we to make of Rémy? He goes straight to his mistress in Paris. You are a womaniser, she says, incapable of loving... it might as well be written on your passport.

Evelyne arrives in Paris, looking to be met, unsure. MM does this so well. His commercial travellers' hotel is all too seedy for her and she flees...

An excellent drama about a petite fille being brave at last, a womaniser being in love at last, and their failure to escape the fatefulness of timetables and indeed time.

Vicki Baum was a writer of monumental trivialities of casual stuff, and this is no exception. Michèle Morgan is always worth watching an entire film for her amazing beauty, and the same could be said about Jean Marais whose good looks were perfect for any romantic role. The introduction is overwhelmingly romantic for its beauty, this is René Clement at his best, but unfortunately that standard is not sustained. The romance is sustained, but somehow the other relationships of the lovers enter as a disturbing sub-plot, which brings everything down on a mundane basis, especially the cold professionalism of Michèle Morgan's husband, a judge, whose only concern is his career. The glass house is a small sculpture of glass of a castle that eventually falls down and breaks into pieces, and both Michèle Morgan and Jean Marais trample into the pieces and get bleeding feet - a kind of symbolism for the whole picture. You feel throughout that this can never end well, no matter how beautiful and fascinatingly well they act in their beautious engagement, they practically speak all through the film of their necessary departure, and when it finally takes place, it's not as they had thought. It's an interesting and beautiful film on a poor story, like a short story by Maupassant or O.Henry, and it never gets into any interesting depths or ecstatic heights - it just roams undecidedly around Paris, and Jean Marais is perfectly right in wanting to keep her there - pity he doesn't get what he wants.

This might be the least known of Clement's films.It has an intriguing beginning and an unexpected end;in between ,it's sometimes dull.

The film begins with a strange monologue by Michèle Morgan :sometimes we feel she is out of her mind.Then she and Jean Marais (what a beautiful pairing:) go to a ball : a mystery atmosphere almost predating that of "Last Year in Marienbad" .

The cinematography is dazzling and really flatters the stars.But the story itself is never really exciting,cause we've been through this should-I-leave-my-husband/Heartbreaker -finding- true-love run-of-the-mill too many times.

The ending may have disconcerted the audience of 1950 that was not used to that kind of unexpected thing.There's something of "twelve monkeys" here;actually the movie will end in the future tense.

This bittersweet offering from René Clément comes between his acclaimed 'Au-dela des Grilles' and ''Jeux Interdits' and is adapted from the novel 'Do we ever know?' by Vicki Baum. The film's title refers to the fragility of the love that has no future between the playboy Rémi of Jean Marais and the married Evelyne of Michele Morgan.

Having already worked together in 'Aux Yeux du Souvenir' for Jean Delannoy, the simpatico/chemistry between Marais and Morgan is palpable and they are complemented perfectly by the fascinating Elina Labourdette as his titular mistress Marion and in the role of Evelyne's husband, the always good value Jean Servais, both of whose characters contribute a distinct 'edge' to proceedings.

It is beautifully shot by Robert Lefebvre and Clément has used the flash forward technique to insert a fragment of the future into the present which was most unusual for the time and which audiences found somewhat disconcerting.

Although a minor entry in this director's oeuvre this has an undeniably haunting quality not to mention an elegance and finesse which belong alas to a vanished era.