The following notes on Such a Pretty Little Beach were written by Josh Martin, the Cinematheque’s Bleak Week programmer and a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW – Madison. Such a Pretty Little Beach will screen at UW Cinematheque on Sunday, June 28 at 7 p.m. as part of our Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair series, presented in partnership with the American Cinematheque. Admission is free, and the UW Cinematheque is located at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave.
By Josh Martin
As he disembarks from a bus late at night in the opening scene of Yves Allégret’s Such a Pretty Little Beach, incessant rain pouring around him, the quiet and reserved Pierre (Gérard Philipe) receives an apt warning from the driver: “You’re in for bad weather.” In the film’s early minutes, the portent of ominous skies to come takes on weight both literal—the downpour never seems to end—and metaphorical, with a surplus of signals to the spectator that we are staring down a path of pure doom and gloom in the tale ahead. Indeed, in the opening notes for its 2013 restoration, Pathé calls attention to an unusual historical restriction placed on Allégret’s film. When Pretty Little Beach was released in France in 1949, the conclusion of the second World War still a recent memory, spectators under the age of 16 were prohibited from admission, with the producers also required to place an almost comically lengthy textual disclaimer before and after the film. The opening text reads as follows: “The makers of this film wish to point out that their characters belong to a psychological tradition bearing little resemblance to reality. They do not wish to malign the reputation of war orphans whom government provides with an existence similar to that of other children. War orphans become painters, sculptors, lawyers, doctors, engineers, officers, and government officials. They have their place in the nation’s elite. Criminals come from all walks of life.”
To contemporary eyes, there is something evidently quaint about this reputational damage control, as is the case with many censorious historical practices. It, of course, spoils some of the mystery: after reading this, we can be pretty certain we will learn that a war orphan has done some terrible things over the course of the next 90 minutes. However, there is something about the purported necessity of this warning that likewise highlights just how potent and powerful Allégret’s film can be. There is a true sense of danger to the film’s hopelessness, a nerve that it touches—and a subsequent need to shatter the illusion and quell any notion that the world could possibly be as tragic as presented here by Allégret. Released under the alternate title Riptide in the U.S. in 1951, it is a fitting moniker for a film whose characters and environments seem to be swept up in an all-encompassing malaise.
The “psychological tradition” alluded to in the opening crawl will be more legible to today’s viewers as film noir, a term that, at the time of Pretty Little Beach’s release, was still to come, soon to be propagated by French critics in reference to the ongoing wave of moody, hard-boiled, and darkly violent American crime films. Noir tendencies here emerge in both the film’s visual style—its low-key, high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, particularly—and in its narrative beats. The film follows the stranger Pierre as he visit this seaside town in the off-season, when the rain falls in sheets, turning the ground into a muddy, filthy hellscape. Despite the insistence from the driver that “it’s a charming region,” we see little reason for optimism: the very title of the film gestures towards a certain cynicism in its worldview, a grim irony that will slowly seep its way into the proceedings. Eventually, the viewer comes to understand that Pierre has been in this town before: he spent his tragic youth as an orphan here, eventually escaping his circumstances through less-than-savory means, a fact that explains his interest in another orphaned young man in the town. Moreover, Pierre is on the run, having committed a terrible act in Paris, one that has reached the newspapers even in this remote village.
Yves Allégret was a successful director, but his reputation is that of a minor figure in French film history. Upon his passing in 1979, Allégret was credited in various obituaries with the explosion of French noir but was almost always exclusively associated with two more iconic figures: the film star Simone Signoret (1955’s Diabolique), his wife of five years, and Jean Renoir, for whom he worked as an assistant director on A Day in the Country (1946), among other projects. To encounter Pretty Little Beach, however, is to engage with the work of an unheralded stylist. There is something immediate and tactile about Allégret’s conjuring of a dreary atmosphere: one feels the dread of Pretty Little Beach quite palpably.
It is obviously not unusual for a work of film noir to be visually and tonally expressionistic whilst engaging dark subject material. What strikes a viewer of Pretty Little Beach is the effective fusion of expressive style with a certain streak of unsettling minimalism, especially the dearth of nondiegetic music in key sequences establishing the film’s moody milieu. Approaching the town’s desolate hotel early in the dead of night, Allégret focuses on Pierre’s footsteps, distinct against the ceaseless flow of rain. Once inside, details of an almost surreal sort emerge: a close-up, visual and sonic, of a rickety step in the stairs, or the audible—yet illegible—protestations of an old man, stationary near the center of the room. In another early shot, Allégret’s camera captures Pierre cradling a gun, only to have his attention captured by a young man pumping water from a well, the rhythmic creak of the pump producing a sense of unease. Together, all of these minor audiovisual touches accumulate to emotionally color the film’s world: when Pierre abruptly begins crying near the scene’s end, the creak of the pump and the downpour both still audible, it feels inevitable rather than entirely unexpected.
There is little extensive writing on Pretty Little Beach, which is perhaps the textbook definition of an underseen and underrated work, ripe for rediscovery in conjunction with its recent restoration. In archived program notes penned for a 1980 screening of Pretty Little Beach at BAMPFA (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive), the uncredited author contextualizes the film within the French noir tradition, while also contrasting the enthusiasm of French cineaste Georges Sadoul and the more tepid response of critics who found the film “too grim and despairing,” particularly Bosley Crowther of The New York Times. “It seems to us,” Crowther writes, “that M. [Allégret] has strived too painstakingly for atmospheric effects… [the film] moves at a tediously slow pace.” Of course, Crowther’s assertions of a “studiously contrived” artfulness, paired with the refusal to pare down its bleakness, remain two of Such a Pretty Little Beach’s most enduring attributes. Allégret sustains his stylized atmosphere in part by plunging us into the depths of this despair, seen through the eyes of a character who is helpless to change his fate. Yet if there is a glimmer of hope at the film’s conclusion, it lies in the suggestion that the cycle of pain that trapped Pierre can be halted for others, lives ending and starting anew on this charming little beach.