Remembering Brigitte Bardot

The first Bardot film I saw was titled, when screened in a double bill at the now demolished art deco masterpiece Hoyts Padua in Brunswick, The Night Heaven Fell. In French I later discovered it was titled Les Bijoutiers du Clair de Lune which I think translates as ‘Moonlight Jewelers’ whatever that means. The place was packed, almost entirely male and my mates and I thought the very fleeting views of Bardot near naked were quite a sight. The censor had removed a few frames of nudity. 

 

The Night Heaven Fell  was not the first Bardot movie to screen here. And God Created Woman had previously run for weeks in one of Greater Union’s city cinemas and there had been seasons of her earlier films at what were then known as Melbourne’s Continental picture theatres, the Savoy and the Australia & Curzon, sin palaces in their day where schoolboys entered furtively and hoped the cashier wouldn’t bar them from watching a film classified “Suitable Only for Adults”. 

Not long after, at the Australia, I got in to see The Bride is Much Too Beautiful aka La Mariée est trop belle  made immediately after And God Created Woman  in 1956 . It starred Bardot, who leaned over a lot and frequently stripped down to lacy undies and Louis Jourdan. It was shown in Australia years after it had been made. Film distribution was hit and miss in those days and the likes of Sid Blake and Robert Kapferer often waited until the price of an item had fallen way down before they bought the Australian rights. This one had no great distinguishing features even though the place was packed out with young to middle aged to old males. The film was not one of what John Baxter has called the “17 mediocre films” Bardot made before And God Created Woman. But it was made immediately after and was, well, mediocre.

 

But And God Created Woman was a revelation even in what we were led to believe was the censored copy that circulated in Australia. Fun fact. Visiting Paris years later  I noticed that Et Dieu Crea La Femme was playing somewhere and trotted  off to  what turned out to be a distant fleapit to attempt to discover just what had been cut in Australia (at least according to my memory). The answer, rather disappointingly, was nothing. The version screened in Paris, apart from being in French, seemed exactly as I recalled it.

You do have to wonder whether Bardot would be quite the revered figure she became without Godard’s Contempt/Le Mepris  being on her c.v. Here her sullen pouts were perfect as she played the wife of scriptwriter Michel Piccoli, both hanging round in Rome while Fritz Lang is making some version of Homer’s The Odyssey. Like sure. Once again the first viewing of the film in Australia ran into a censorship problem as the full technicolor shots of her naked back and bum were cut, leaving only the tinted red and blue shots of the same for us to get the idea. Apparently the sequence was added when producer Carlo Ponti asked for a bit more nudity. Years later, only when the film came out on DVD did Australians get the chance to see the sequence in toto. That film by the way did lead to one very smart homage in a minor French film called Monsieur Ibrahim made in 2003 by François Dupeyron. In the film Omar Sharif plays a Muslim shopkeeper whose tiny establishment is used by a local Jewish boy for some minor shoplifting. At one point man and boy are stunned as a Bardot lookalike, dressed as Bardot was for the finale of Contempt stops outside the shop in a little red sports car, climbs out, walks in and buys some cigarettes and departs. Homage over, the movie is resumed.

She did work with some interesting directors after And God Created Woman. Claude Autant-Lara directed her with Gabin in the Simenon adaptation En Cas de Malheur. H-G Clouzot had a huge international box office success with La Verite. Julien Duvivier made a mediocre movie, titled out here A Woman Like Satan, of the same novel, “The Woman and the Puppet”,  by Pierre Louys that von Sternberg  adapted in 1932 as  Devil is a Woman and Bunuel in 1977 as That Obscure Object of Desire. Both were rather better versions of the story.  (In fact the novel has been adapted to film, in all, eight times between 1920 and 2006 which may be some sort of record.) Louis Malle tried to explore the Bardot as hounded and harassed star myth in Vie Privee and tried to exploit her comedic abilities in Viva Maria.

She made four films with Vadim including her second last  Don Juan, Or If Don Juan Were A Woman (1973), notably mostly for a scene where she and Jane Birkin roll around naked in a bit of movie sex. At one point the flimsiness of the set is apparent when a wall shudders after a door is closed. That said a lot about the modest ambition of the project and probably more than anything or any other film caused her to, at the age of 39, as they say, give the game away for ever. 

She became a passionate crusader against animal cruelty but her life after movies was also filled with multiple cases of being fined for inciting racial hatred. Her views on gays and feminists were reactionary for the most part and later in life she aligned herself with the Le Pen family and their various political parties.