Manon

Suspicion, murder and delirium, the Henri-Georges Clouzot romance nonpareil. End of war and beginning of relationship, the Resistance fighter (Michel Auclair) meets the young blonde (Cécile Aubry) as she's about to get the collaborator's head-shaving treatment, shattered saints salute their embrace in the bombed-out church. (By nightfall the two are "like newlyweds," silhouettes desperately hanging on to each other.) "Let's show them it's possible to be happy." She lives for luxury and fun, to keep her he dives into the black market. The penicillin racket (The Third Man), the American major suckered for supplies, a stint at the Parisian bordello. Her brother (Serge Reggiani) is a sharpie whose dream of respectability is to open a movie theater ("Just a few locals coming for a grope in the dark"), "Le Magic" glows on the neon marquee. Clouzot goes to the source of Puccini's opera and gives it the Zola treatment, a relentless analysis sustained over years and across continents. Amour fou is its own illumination in devastated terrain (power shortages are a recurring aspect of postwar life), the reunion on the crowded train dissolves from the couple amid engine steam to a ship's smokestack. (They recount their tale as stowaway fugitives aboard a freighter headed to Palestine.) "We're old before our time, after all we've seen." The arrival at the Promised Land is a bogus happy ending, the film continues on for another reel and grinds down the hopefuls. The oasis is a mere pit stop in the cruel desert, the horde of Arabs astride camels materializing in the dunes mirror the earlier glimpse of a Western screening at the shabby cinema. Between Stroheim's manacled figures (Greed) and Ray's lost outfit (Bitter Victory), one last kiss in the sand. "Nothing is disgusting when people are in love." With Raymond Souplex, Andrex, André Valmy, Henri Vilbert, Dora Doll, Héléna Manson, and Gabrielle Dorziat. In black and white.