Among the highlights of MOMA's Julien Duvivier retrospective last month was his 1956 Deadlier Than the Male (aka Voici le Temps des Assassins) starring Jean Gabin and Daniele Delorme. This underappreciated noir featured Gabin (Grand Illusion, Pepe le Moko) as a successful chef who, though warned by his mother, quickly married the young daughter of his (supposedly deceased) ex-wife only to be caught in a web of lies, murder, drug abuse, betrayal, suicide. Duvivier's unrelentingly dark gray vision of postwar Paris and surrounding countryside was reminiscent of his 1950 Sous le Ciel de Paris (which also played at MOMA) and doubled as a subtle critique of the aging bourgeois male, still fighting against his mother's control of his personal life yet still running to her for help. From Bosley Crowther's review for New York Times, October 9, 1957:
"To look at this fetching young lady (Delorme) with her doll's face, her slightly crossed eyes and her air of innocent enjoyment . . . you would hardly suspect she had in her . . . the venom, the sang-froid and the contrivance of a (Catherine) Corday. Yet that's what she gives us in this picture—a beguilingly beautiful girl with an utterly ruthless aggression against the whole category of males."
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