‘Still beautiful’: Michèle Morgan in the 1960s

ABSTRACT

This article examines Michèle Morgan’s films of the 1960s, the last phase in her long career, and one hitherto ignored by film history, largely on account of the dearth of auteur films in the star’s late filmography. Morgan’s 1960s films are explored against three contexts: the impact of the New Wave on popular cinema (in particular the arrival of youth culture); the changing social context, especially as it affected women; and the importance of age, given that Morgan was 40 at the beginning of the decade. Morgan’s films are shown to divide into two main strands: on the one hand, large-budget omnibus or ensemble films, mostly in light comic mode, and on the other hand, smaller-scale dramas in which she is systematically paired with a younger actor in a romantic relationship that is on the whole doomed. The article argues that the films’ deployment of Morgan’s star persona as the elegant bourgeois woman opposite younger actresses betrays society’s ambivalence towards the younger generation. At the same time, while Morgan is depicted as an attractive, sexually active, desiring woman in practically all the films, the narratives articulate a recurrent unease with the ‘older’ woman’s sexual identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Michèle Morgan
• ageing stardom
• 1960s French Cinema
• French New Wave

By 1960, Michèle Morgan had already had three careers: as the emblematic young heroine of Poetic Realism, as part of the French émigré community in Hollywood during the war and as one of the most popular female stars of French cinema in the 1950s. These different phases of Morgan’s filmography have attracted uneven critical attention, with most scholarly work initially concentrated on the 1930s (Driskell 2015), although research in French stardom and popular cinephilia has begun to address her remarkable popularity in the 1950s (Le Gras 2014; Le Gras and Sellier 2015), work that is being pursued in this special issue. Beyond this decade, Morgan’s output remains resolutely below the critical radar. And yet she continued to work, especially in the first half of the 1960s, and altogether appeared in 20 films and seven television films up to 1999. With only a couple of exceptions, these were mainstream films, explaining their critical oblivion, especially in a period dominated by the New Wave and the increased visibility of auteur cinema. Even the Dictionnaire du Cinéma Populaire Français dismisses Morgan’s 1960s career by simply stating: ‘Between 1960 and 1965, Michèle Morgan makes a lot of films, before moving away from the cinema’ (Baron 2006, 555).¹ Yet the star’s 1960s films deserve re-examination, in terms of her own trajectory, of the resilience of popular genres and of Morgan’s embodiment of a sexually attractive woman of a ‘certain age’ (Sontag 1972, 285).

This article examines how Morgan negotiated her post-1960 career, under three interlocking frameworks. First, the 1960s was a pivotal decade for French cinema, following the upheaval of the New Wave, and any examination of a French film star of the time needs to factor in the changing landscape of stardom, notably the foregrounding of youth that was so characteristic of the movement. Secondly, the period was one of great change for women on the social scene, and major female stars are an important test for the way films engage with such transformations. Thirdly, Morgan, born in 1920, turned 40 at the beginning of the decade. As such, she is a telling example of the deleterious effect of ageing on a female star’s image and career, despite her elevated status in the film industry as well as popular and critical consensus over her elegant beauty.

The 1960s started well for Morgan, with two successful films in which she is the female lead, paired with a well-known male actor. In Les Scélérats/The Wretches (1960), she is married to Robert Hossein, also the director of the film, and in Fortunat (Alex Joffé, 1960), she forms a deliberately ill-assorted, yet touching, couple with the comic star Bourvil.² Subsequently, Morgan’s films in the 1960s fell into two major groups. She appeared in several omnibus films, a genre typical of that decade (Betz 2009, 179–244): Le Crime ne paie pas/Crime Does Not Pay (Gérard Oury, 1962), Il fornaretto di Venezia/Le procès des Doges/The Scapegoat (Duccio Tessari, 1963) and Méfiez-vous Mesdames…/Be Careful Ladies (André Hunebelle, 1963). To these can be added Les Lions sont lâchés/The Lions Are Loose (Henri Verneuil, 1961) and Landru (Claude Chabrol, 1963), two ensemble films featuring interwoven stories and a large cast, as well as the US war film Lost Command/Les Centurions (Mark Robson, 1966), in which Morgan’s contribution is intermittent. All these have in common large budgets (they are often co-productions), an accumulation of stars (Figure 1) and a light-hearted or parodic tone – the only exception being Lost Command. They generally did well at the box office, as can be seen in Table 1. Morgan’s presence in these major productions, often with top billing, attests to her status, even if her on-screen presence is de facto limited by the nature of the genre, while for the same reason she is juxtaposed with several other major stars, notably her former rival Danielle Darrieux. The second type of films Morgan made in the 1960s were dramas or thrillers in which she is the undisputed female lead but which were smaller in scale and significantly less successful at the box office: Le Puits aux trois vérités/Three Faces of Sin (François Villiers, 1961), Rencontres/Meetings (Philippe Agostini, 1962), Constance aux enfers/Web of Fear (François Villiers, 1964), Les Pas perdus/The Last Steps (Jacques Robin, 1964) and Les Yeux cernés/Marked Eyes (Robert Hossein, 1964). These five films form a coherent group thematically, presenting her as a seductive mature woman, paired with a younger man, with mostly tragic consequences.

Figure 1. The omnibus film and its accumulation of stars. From left to right: Lino Ventura, Michèle Morgan, Danielle Darrieux, Claudia Cardinale and Jean-Claude Brialy in Les Lions sont lâchés.

Table 1. Michéle morgan – 1960s box office.

Title	Release Date France	Co-stars	Box-Office France (tickets sold)
Les Scélérats	1960	R. Hossein, P. Pradier	1,480,158
Fortunat	1960	Bourvil	3,338,322
Le Puits aux trois vérités	1960	J-C Brialy, C. Spaak	1,548,615
Les Lions sont lâchés	1961	C. Cardinale, J-C Brialy, L. Ventura, D. Darrieux	2,054,954
Rencontres	1962	P. Brasseur, G. Ferzetti	644,075
Le Crime ne paie pas	1962	D. Darrieux, E. Feuillère, A. Girardot, P. Brasseur	1,327,403
Landru	1963	D. Darrieux, H. Kneff, S. Audran, C. Denner	1,331,849
Il fornaretto di Venezia/Le Procès des doges	1963	J. Perrin, S. Koscina, S. Sandrelli	591,883
Méfiez-vous Mesdames…	1963	P. Meurisse, S. Milo, G. Sylvia, D. Darrieux,	1,189,937
Constance aux enfers	1964	D. Saval, S. Andreu	804,346
Les Pas perdus	1964	J-L Trintignant, C. Rouvel	386,220
Les Yeux cernés	1964	R. Hossein, M-F Pisier	821,725
Dis-moi qui tuer	1965	P. Hubschmid, D. Moreno, J. Yanne	293,307
Lost Command	1966	A. Delon, A. Quinn, M. Ronet	4,294,756
Benjamin, ou les mémoires d’un puceau	1968	M. Piccoli, C. Deneuve, P. Clementi	2,542,714
Le Chat et la souris	1975	S. Reggiani ; P. Léotard	1,110,812

Box-office figures : Simsi 2012.

Cameo appearancesUn cœur gros comme ça/The Winner (François Reichenbach, 1961)

Robert et Robert/Robert and Robert (Claude Lelouch, 1978)

Un homme et une femme, vingt ans déjà/A Man and a Woman, 20 Years Later (Claude Lelouch, 1986)

Stanno tutti bene/Everybody’s Fine (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1990)

The last two films in which Morgan plays a significant role depart from the categories delineated above, and I will come to them briefly in the last section of this article: Benjamin ou les mémoires d’un puceau/The Diary of an Innocent Boy (Michel Deville, 2012) and Le Chat et la souris/Cat and Mouse (Claude Lelouch, 1975). However, I will omit Morgan’s television films and mini-series from the corpus examined here, as well as the films in which she makes merely a cameo appearance.³

Morgan in the shifting landscape of 1960s French stardom

Morgan turned 40 in 1960, at a moment when French society was experiencing the unprecedented rise of youth as both a consumerist force and a new culture. It marked a point when the generation of ‘baby boomers’ reached adolescence just as the country was beginning to enjoy the rewards of the Trente Glorieuses economic boom (De Baecque 1998; Sohn 2001; Bantigny 2007). While the rise of new generations is evidently an ongoing phenomenon, youth made a particularly spectacular entry in French cinema in the period in question. With Et Dieu… créa la femme/And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956), Brigitte Bardot triumphed as the ultimate cinematic enfant terrible (Weiner 2001), a compelling vision of insolent female youth (Rihoit 1986; Vincendeau 2013; Burch and Sellier 2014). At the turn of the 1960s ‘B.B.’ reached the peak of her popularity with films such as Babette s’en va-t-en guerre/Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959), La Vérité (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960) and Le Repos du guerrier/Love on a Pillow (Roger Vadim, 1962). Concurrently, the New Wave imposed not just the ethos and practice of auteur cinema, but a new generation of actors with new images and new performance styles. For Alain Brassart, this generation was predominantly male; he argues that ‘we witnessed a massive renewal of male actors brought about by the New Wave […]. Apart from Brigitte Bardot, the undisputed star of the period, the actresses were more discreet.’ (Brassart 2004, 17–18)⁴ If the actors analysed by Brassart – Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Jean-Claude Brialy and Jean-Louis Trintignant – undoubtedly reconfigured youthful masculinity on screen, a similar argument can be made for female stardom, even if few of the women enjoyed the very long careers of their male counterparts, a function of the endemic gender imbalance in casting practices in French cinema.

In Bardot’s wake, a generation of younger actresses emerged in the early 1960s, from both mainstream cinema, including Catherine Deneuve (born 1943), Dany Saval (1942), Perrette Pradier (1938) and Catherine Spaak (1945), and the New Wave: Stéphane Audran (1932), Marie-France Pisier (1944), Anna Karina (1940) and Bernadette Lafont (1938) among others (on New Wave stars see Vincendeau 2000; Austin 2003; Sellier 2008). As part of a large-scale comparative survey of French cinema conducted in 1961, sociologist Evelyne Sullerot noted the unusual prominence of female protagonists in New Wave films compared with the mainstream, and that moreover, these were young women: ‘There are no little girls, only two women in their forties, and the rest are under thirty. By contrast, mainstream productions generally privilege women between thirty and forty, the typical age of the established “major star”’ (Sullerot 1961, 17).⁵ Of course, there were exceptions to this rule. Jeanne Moreau, Emmanuelle Riva and Delphine Seyrig embodied a more mature femininity in New Wave cinema (all three were then in their thirties), but their bohemian and/or intellectual aura and closeness to the New Wave milieu put them apart from mainstream stars. As a result, Morgan, despite being only eight years older than Moreau, in the early 1960s suddenly appeared a whole generation apart, especially as her films relentlessly contrasted her to younger actresses who, in their physique, clothes, language and demeanour, projected an image of ‘youth’.

Morgan’s star persona thus aged more rapidly than her actual years, illustrating the fact that the meaning of age varies according to societal perception at any given time (Courcoux, Le Gras, and Moine 2017, 14). In 1960s France, the rise of youth culture entailed a jeunisme which relegated the 40-year-olds to the parents’ generation, the croulants [‘the oldies’], to use a term from that era, with gender aggravating the situation. Discussing a survey about ageing conducted in the early 1960s, Ménie Grégoire quotes a young woman’s view that for women everything stops at 40 (Grégoire 1963, 917). In turn, the class identity and stylistic contours of Morgan’s star image as well as her performance style at the turn of the 1960s facilitated such readings of obsolescence at an age considered relatively young today when ‘forty is the new thirty’ (Jermyn 2012, 1).

Jonathan Driskell has shown how Morgan’s youthful screen image in the 1930s exuded ‘mystery, purity and metaphysicality […] Morgan seemed to exist outside time and space as a poetic and transcendent form of femininity’ (Driskell 2015, 192). These qualities arose from her roles as a melancholy waif in Poetic Realist classics such as Le Quai des brumes/Port of Shadows (Marcel Carné, 1938) and Remorques/Stormy Waters (Jean Grémillon, 1941), where she contrasted sharply with the earthy physicality of her screen partner Jean Gabin, and the depraved world around her. Her slender physique, precise diction, smooth facial features and much remarked-upon pale blue eyes were a perfect vessel for these characters. Her first major role in France after the war years in Hollywood, in La Symphonie pastorale/Pastoral Symphony (Jean Delannoy, 1946), reprised this pure and elevated figure, but as the 1950s unfolded, Morgan’s image took a worldlier, class-inflected identity. She played the part of distinguished bourgeois or aristocratic women in numerous films, such as L’Étrange Madame X/The Strange Madame X (Jean Grémillon, 1951) and Les Grandes manœuvres/Summer Manoeuvres (René Clair, 1955), retaining an air of social distinction and uprightness, whatever the role: a cabaret singer in Marguerite de la nuit/Marguerite of the Night (Claude Autant-Lara, 1955), an alcoholic lawyer in Pourquoi viens-tu si tard…/Too Late to Love (Henri Decoin, 1959) and so on. As she points out in her autobiography With Those Eyes, she could not stray too far: ‘the only time I agreed to play the bitch, in Retour de manivelle, no one found it convincing!’ (Morgan 1978, 302). There was also a world-weary facet to her persona, underlined by the slow, disenchanted tone of her voice. For the filmmaker Paul Vecchiali, this conferred wisdom on her, suggesting a woman who knew better (Vecchiali 2017, 66). But the strong aura of melancholy also led to her being typecast almost exclusively as a suffering or tragic heroine. Although she resented ‘being assigned victim parts, women with unhappy fates, who are generally crying and/or dying’ (Morgan 1978, 302), the trend persisted into the 1960s, as we shall see.

Also indelibly attached to Morgan, by extension from the filmmakers she worked with in the 1950s (Delannoy, Clair, Decoin, Autant-Lara), was her identity as a star of the ‘Tradition of Quality’ cinema, against whom the young New Wave critics and later filmmakers rebelled. It is no accident that a photograph of Morgan figures on the cover of Jean Montarnal’s book on ‘la qualité française’ (Montarnal 2018). Such an association was sealed early by François Truffaut (1959, 9) in a characteristically direct declaration of hostility:

Personally, I will systematically refuse to make films with five stars: Fernandel, Michèle Morgan, Jean Gabin, Gérard Philipe and Pierre Fresnay. These artists are too dangerous; they impose a script or change it if they don’t like it. They do not hesitate to dictate the cast or refuse to work with certain actors. They influence mise-en-scène and demand close-ups; they sacrifice the best interest of a film to their status and they are, in my opinion, to blame for many failures.⁶

Whether or not the five individuals were guilty of the abuses Truffaut denounces, his target is clear: the stars of the Tradition of Quality. Morgan’s presence on the list is thus unsurprising, although worthy of comment for two reasons. First, the fact that she is the only woman confirms the male bias of the French star system, especially in terms of box-office popularity (Vincendeau 2000, 24–30). Secondly, these were middle-aged (Morgan, Philipe) or older stars (Fernandel, Gabin, Fresnay), so Truffaut’s list also confirms the ageist slant of the New Wave. Indeed, Morgan’s films of the 1960s in many ways stage the clash in age, physique and performance styles between Tradition of Quality and New Wave female stardom.

Made at the dawn of the 1960s, Les Scélérats both sums up Morgan’s melancholy bourgeois characterisation and controlled performance style and takes stock of her career so far. Thelma (Morgan) lives with her husband in a fabulous modernist house set in an imaginary working-class suburb that might be Belgian or French. She and her husband Jess (Hossein) are meant to be American, the modernity of the house underlined by the jazz score. Although, unsurprisingly, Thelma speaks perfect French, she conducts dinner-time conversations in English, while Jess speaks Russian. The film is based on a thriller by Frédéric Dard (who contributed to the script) that can be seen as a parody of/tribute to the American genre, but Thelma’s identity on screen is also a clear allusion to Morgan’s time in Hollywood, where she had married the American actor Bill Marshall and had a son, Mike. More generally, the large, curtain-less, picture windows of the illuminated house function as a surrogate film screen which the working-class neighbours gaze at from their dingy house across the dark street. As the film unfolds, Thelma’s pervading sadness and addiction to whisky are explained by the earlier death of the couple’s son in America, eventually leading to her suicidal death. The 1960 audience would also have been aware that Morgan’s second husband, Henri Vidal, who suffered from drug addition, had died the previous year. In other words, her character is firmly set in the past by the narrative, while allusions to her life and stardom are turned towards earlier events and achievements. In this respect Morgan’s professional longevity (she made her first films in 1936 at the age of 16) could be said to contribute to the perception of her ageing. Whereas in this particular film, her longevity is narrativised, the point applies more generally to her perception in the 1960s, as reviewers tend to make references to her long career and the passing of time, sometimes formulated as a (somewhat back-handed) compliment: ‘Time slips over her like water off a duck’s back’ (Bory 1964); her ‘heart-breaking face has already moved two generations’ (Garson 1964); ‘Apparently this is Madame Michèle Morgan’s 50th film. Well! They’ve not been kind to her’ (Rochereau 1964).⁷ In Les Scélérats, this dimension of the narrative is reinforced by the arrival of a young working-class woman from across the street, Louise (Perrette Pradier), who is obsessed with the couple and volunteers to work for them as a maid. Louise’s mousy hair, cheap trench-coat, maid’s outfit and meek appearance contrast with Thelma’s platinum locks, fur coat, evening dresses and haughty, if sad, demeanour. Morgan’s low, weary speech acts as a foil to Pradier’s high-pitched, nervous voice. The contrast between the 22-year-old Pradier’s Louise and Morgan’s Thelma sets the scene for the star’s films of the 1960s, which will fix her identity in the realm of the middle-aged bourgeois grande dame (Figure 2) and systematically construct her identity against the younger generation of actresses from, or influenced by, the New Wave. Thelma may be Louise’s social superior, but, as she tells her, her youth is worth ‘millions’.

Figure 2. The bourgeois grande dame (Michèle Morgan) and her maid (Perrette Pradier) in Les Scélérats.

In her 1960s films, the privileged social status of Morgan’s characters is a given. She is or has been married to rich or famous men and she lives in beautiful apartments in Paris or the Côte d’Azur, or in the chic western suburbs of Paris: Le Vésinet, Montfort l’Amaury. In Lost Command, she is a countess whose family owns a chateau. Mostly she lives the life of a wealthy idle wife as in Les Pas perdus, a socialite in Les Lions sont lâchés, or a rentière if the film is set in the past, such as Landru. On the rare occasions she has a job or an occupation, running an antique shop in Le Puits aux trois vérités, sculpting in Le Crime ne paie pas, it is presented as a hobby rather than an economic necessity. Constance aux enfers at first seems to depart from this pattern, as she plays a widowed piano teacher. However, Constance soon specifies that she has money and gives piano lessons only to keep busy, and the spectator can’t help noticing that she does her daily shopping toting a Hermès handbag.

Cultural differences with the younger generation are manifest in areas that define youth culture, such as music, so that in Constance aux enfers, her taste for classical music clashes explicitly with Claude Bolling’s jazz favoured by her young neighbours. In distinguishing Morgan from younger women, however, fashion and performance are the most important signifiers. In all her films of the 1960s, Morgan’s blonde hair is always impeccably, and rather stiffly, coiffed. She wears elegant dresses, suits, blouses and coats that emphasise her slim silhouette and reveal her neck, arms and legs. But her clothes, whoever the designer, also stylistically associate her with haute couture, in an era when Yves Saint-Laurent declared it ‘a relic of the past’ and Bardot asserted that it was for ‘grannies’ (Steele 1998, 277–282), to be replaced by young prêt-à-porter designers, while New Wave actresses sported more modest clothes, often their own. Formality is a characteristic of Morgan’s attire, her pearl necklaces and diamond brooches typical of the society woman, as in her first appearance in Méfiez-vous Mesdames…, complete with a cigarette-holder (Figure 3). Her coats are always beautifully cut, or, as in Le Puits aux trois vérités and Les Yeux cernés, made of fur. She wears gloves, hats and scarves. This elegant but formal image is enhanced by the contrast with the younger actresses’ clothes, a comparison that is positive or negative, depending on the genre of the film. In the comedy Les Lions sont lâchés, the running comparison between Cécile (Morgan) and her young friend Albertine (Claudia Cardinale) is amiable. Albertine systematically wears a ‘younger’ version of Cécile’s clothes. But we notice that Cardinale’s hair is less disciplined, the fabrics are softer and the boisterous movements of the actress translate into informality and spontaneity: when at one point Albertine borrows one of Cécile’s dresses, it is in a flimsy, almost childish, polka-dot fabric. Later, Albertine wears a shirt made of gingham, the emblematic ‘young’ fabric made famous by Bardot (Vincendeau 2013, 83–88).

Figure 3. Couture chic: Michèle Morgan in Méfiez-vous Mesdames… .

By contrast, the thriller Constance aux enfers sets up a violent generational clash. Morgan’s lonely piano teacher observes, and is mocked by, a young woman, Pascale, played by Dany Saval, who lives with her lover Hugo (Simón Andreu) on the opposite side of the courtyard. Though largely forgotten since, Saval in the 1960s was a prominent incarnation of youthful femininity in mainstream cinema. In Constance aux enfers, she plays a typically brash, fashionable young woman. Her blonde hair is styled in a bob with a fringe, the new ‘standard of the 1960s generation’ (Zdatny 2011, 233); her clothes are by the young designer Real (popularised by Bardot) and include short, ‘geometric’ dresses and a polka-dot bikini. Together with her shrill voice and loud partying to jazz music, her appearance serves to designate the contrastingly decorous and discreet Morgan as a woman of the past, with her classical music and prim blouses. Revealed by Marcel Carné’s Les Tricheurs/Youthful Sinners (1958), Saval tended to appear in misogynist characterisations – as an accident-prone ‘dumb blonde’ in boulevard comedies such as in Comment réussir en amour/How to Succeed in Love (Michel Boisrond, 1962) or, as in Constance aux enfers, an updated manifestation of the garce (‘bitch’) of 1950s cinema (Burch and Sellier 2014). Pascale hatches the diabolical plot in which Hugo pretends to kill her, in order to shelter with the kind Constance and extract money from her. The plot is derailed when, after Hugo and Constance become lovers, the latter discovers the ‘dead’ Pascale alive. Understanding she is the victim of their scheme, she plots her own revenge in which Pascale is actually killed by Hugo, with the film’s, and the spectator’s, sympathy. A similar sartorial and performative duality operates in Le Puits aux trois vérités, between Morgan’s Renée and the 16-year-old Catherine Spaak’s Danièle, her daughter and rival in love. Morgan’s elegant ensembles and pearls contrast with Spaak’s tartan trousers and suede jacket. The younger actress’s casual hairstyle, mobility and slang expressions complete the portrait of ‘youth’. The most striking contrast of this kind is in Les Yeux cernés, with the young actress, Marie-France Pisier, directly associated with the New Wave through Truffaut’s episode ‘Antoine et Colette’ in L’Amour à vingt ans/Love at Twenty (1962). Pisier’s juvenile looks and vivacious performance are accentuated by her short, bobbed hair, high boots and pleated skirts, against Morgan’s repressed, buttoned-up, black dress and severely flattened hairstyle (Figure 4). Pisier plays Clara, the daughter of the local hotel’s owners, as a gum-chewing rebellious gamine who insolently answers back and strikes provocative poses in the Bardot mould. The link is made explicit when Clara is seen reading a magazine with Bardot on the cover, a cigarette defiantly planted in her mouth. The rivalry between Morgan’s characters and younger women is a feature of all the films she made during the first half of the 1960s. In Landru, she, Darrieux and a few other older actresses face Catherine Rouvel and Stéphane Audran. Rouvel recurs in Les Pas perdus, as Sonia, the rival to Yolande (Morgan).

Figure 4. Generation gap. Left: Florence (Michèle Morgan) and Clara (Marie-France Pisier) in Les Yeux cernés; right: Constance (Michèle Morgan) and Pascale (Dany Saval) in Constance aux enfers.

In the end, Morgan’s confrontation with the younger generation, in narrative, visual and stardom terms, is ambivalent. While her star status ensures that she inevitably plays the more important part, as confirmed by the films’ credits and posters, the function of the characters played by Cardinale, Pradier, Pisier, Saval, Spaak and Rouvel is to unsettle and/or ridicule her, or, at the very least, underline her age. Yet, with the exception of Les Yeux cernés and Le Puits aux trois vérités, Morgan’s characters are largely vindicated, while the young women are frequently presented as aggressive or jealous creatures. Thus, most of these films, like Bardot’s, if in a more muted way, register both the attraction of a youthful feminine modernity, expressed on screen through the ‘spontaneity’ associated with the New Wave, and the fears provoked by youth as an age group. The films, at the same time, cast Morgan as a figure from the past, characterised by the formality and decorousness typical of the Tradition of Quality performance style, which also enhances her class identity as the elegant bourgeoise. In other ways, though, traces of her 1930s persona remain insofar as in these films Morgan also exists ‘outside time and space’, disconnected from societal change. This is signalled by her conservative tastes in music, clothes and decoration and noticeably, by the fact that the elevated social sphere to which her heroines belong removes them from the realm of work, at the time of the massive arrival of women in the workplace (Duchen 1994; Maruani and Meron 2012). There is one area, however, in which the Morgan star persona in the 1960s is deployed more significantly in sync with French culture at large, and that is the realm of sexuality.

‘Still’ beautiful: the trouble with mature female sexuality

Thanks to her beauty and elegant silhouette, Morgan in her 1960s films, with a few exceptions, plays ‘mature’ women with a sexual identity, both as objects of desire and desiring subjects. In a clear departure from the stereotypical virgin/whore duality of earlier decades, the 1960s films present women’s sexual activity as a given. This shift is well documented for the New Wave: Sullerot points to the way female characters change sexual partners, in ‘[a] sort of de facto equality in terms of sexual behaviour, which is in itself revolutionary’ (Sullerot 1961, 18; see also Sellier 2008).⁸ But although Sullerot continues that in mainstream productions, sexual dalliance is generally reserved for male protagonists, Morgan’s filmography in the 1960s shows that the increased sexualisation of women extends to popular cinema, in line with both social change and the (relative) relaxation of censorship codes in the direction of greater tolerance and visual exposure of nudity. It is estimated that the erotic content of French films leapt from under 15% to over 35% between 1955 and 1966 (Hervé 2015, 437). Accordingly, in most of her 1960s films, the modernity of Morgan’s characters is expressed in large part through her having a sex life – countering the deep-rooted cultural tendency that ‘has effectively reduced middle-aged women to a kind of invisibility with respect to their sexuality’ (Tally 2007, 129). This modernity is however far from being synonymous with a progressive view of female sexuality. In this respect, Morgan’s films can be divided into three strands.

A first, small, group, consisting of Les Scélérats, Les Lions sont lâchés and Le Crime ne paie pas, presents her as asexual. Les Scélérats shows Thelma as so lost in her grief and alcohol that she leaves sex to the maid Louise. Les Lions sont lâchés uses the contrast with the sexy, and sexually active Albertine (Cardinale) to portray Morgan as a fulfilled, but basically asexual, wife and mother. Morgan’s episode ‘L’Affaire Hughes’ in Le Crime ne paie pas configures her as an upright wife and mother devoted to clearing her name after being slandered, and thus bypasses sexuality. But these turn out to be exceptions.

A second group, stereotypically, mocks the sexuality of the middle-aged woman as inherently ridiculous and/or threatening. In Landru, Chabrol’s rendering of the notorious early twentieth-century serial killer is distanced through theatricality. Although Chabrol claimed some kind of objectivity in having simply wanted to ‘show’ Landru (Chabrol 1962, 16), the film implicitly mocks the middle-aged women played by Morgan, Darrieux, Hildegarde Kneff and the older Mary Marquet for falling for Landru’s advances, adhering in this respect to the misogynist assumption that, in Susan Sontag’s words, ‘for most women, aging means a humiliating process of gradual sexual disqualification’ (Sontag 1972, 197). Landru also suggests that these women’s sexual desire is not only inappropriate but stifling for the hero, thus echoing, in parodic mode, the structure identified by Sellier (2008) in many New Wave films, where women function as obstacles to the self-realisation of the male characters. In casting Morgan and Darrieux as Landru’s prime ‘obstacles’, while Audran, who plays his mistress Fernande and was Chabrol’s partner in real life, is his romantic salvation, it is permissible to think that behind Landru stalking his middle-aged victims, the New Wave director is also facetiously targeting two emblematic Tradition of Quality stars, echoing Truffaut’s hostility to them. In Méfiez-vous Mesdames…, the male protagonist Charles, played by Paul Meurisse, comes out of jail bent on taking revenge against Hedwige (Darrieux), the woman who had betrayed him. Through personal columns, like Landru, he appeals to women with a view to marriage. Those who respond appear as middle-aged women intent on ensnaring him: Florence (Gaby Sylvia) has already ‘buried’ four husbands; Gisèle (Morgan) wants him to kill her rich husband so they can marry; Henriette (Sandra Milo) smothers him in sexual and motherly desire. None of them succeeds in truly capturing him. He escapes Gisèle by pretending to drown in the Seine and flees Florence. Hedwige swindles him again but is caught. At the end of the film, Henriette has succeeded in forcing him to work in her pastry shop (Charles piping cream on choux pastry in a chef’s outfit is meant to represent the height of his symbolic castration), but he plans his escape again through the personal columns. Middle-aged female sexuality is thus presented as both emasculating and ineffectual, the combination providing the comic premise of the film.

The third, and by far most interesting, group consists of five films that pair Morgan with younger men as the explicit or implicit object of her desire, turning her into an early screen manifestation of what today might be termed a ‘cougar’ (Figure 5). The young men are played by actors belonging to the generation of jeunes premiers analysed by Brassart, in particular Trintignant (born 1930) in Les Pas perdus, the romantic incarnation of soft virility (‘douceur virile’) (Brassart 2004, 223–294) and Brialy (born 1933) in Le Puits aux trois vérités, in his usual role of hedonistic dandy. In Constance aux enfers, a Franco-Spanish co-production, the masculine protagonist is played by a Spanish actor, Simón Andreu (born 1941). In Rencontres, Morgan’s lover is embodied by Gabriele Ferzetti, an Italian actor only five years her junior but who is made to appear younger by comparison to Pierre Brasseur (born 1905), who plays Morgan’s husband. Finally, in Les Yeux cernés, the male star is Hossein, who is only seven years younger than Morgan, and who as we saw played her husband in Les Scélérats. But the four years elapsed since the earlier film and the triangular relationship with Pisier place him on the side of the younger generation, while his persona remains within his register of a tormented but seductive man. As noted in the comparison between Morgan and younger actresses, the actual age of the male actors sometimes differs from their perception as ‘younger men’, but another factor intervenes. So deeply entrenched in film and society is the habit of pairing older men with younger women that the age difference between, say, Hossein and Pisier in Les Yeux cernés (14 years) or Trintignant and Rouvel in Les Pas perdus (nine years) is not registered by the plot, unlike that of Morgan and the same men, even though their difference in years is the same or may be smaller.

Figure 5. Young men as objects of desire. Top left: Morgan and Jean-Claude Brialy in Le Puits aux trois vérités; bottom left: Morgan and Jean-Louis Trintignant in Les Pas perdus; right: Morgan and Simón Andreu in Constance aux enfers.

The five films, nevertheless, are built on the romantic relationship between Morgan and a younger man, and, unlike Landru or Méfiez-vous Mesdames…, they do not present her desire as ridiculous. Her beautiful face and slim figure are systematically praised by the young men. After their first night together in Constance aux enfers, Hugo tells her that she ‘still’ has a fantastic figure. In Les Pas perdus, Georges waxes lyrical about Yolande’s beauty to his colleague Sonia (Rouvel), who is clearly in love with him, provoking her to retort sharply ‘ça lui passera’, literally ‘she’ll get over it’, but also a pun on ‘it won’t last’. Naturally, Morgan’s eyes, her most famous feature (see the title of her autobiography, With Those Eyes), are recurrently highlighted with close-ups, picked out by lighting and reiterated through numerous allusions in the dialogue. The title of the film Les Yeux cernés is in this respect programmatic as both an homage to her eyes and, in its literal meaning of ‘bags under the eyes’, an unflattering reference to her ageing. For there is also, running through these films, a punitive dimension linked to her liaisons with younger men. The films follow two main tendencies in this respect. Some portray her as a sad, tragic heroine because of her ageing, and others as a malevolent figure wielding lethal powers for the same reason.

In Rencontres, Bella (Morgan) is clearly a victim of her husband (Brasseur), a former virtuoso pianist who is now a wreck and a bully. But while the narrative presents her liaison with Ralph (Ferzetti) as legitimate, by the end her husband is in jail and the last shot shows her alone on the harbour, watching Ralph’s boat disappear. Les Pas perdus is the most sympathetic film in terms of its presentation of her affair. Yolande (Morgan) is a bored bourgeois housewife from the wealthy suburbs, coming into Paris to shop. She meets Georges (Trintignant), whose job is to paint cinema posters, at the Saint-Lazare railway station cinema.⁹ They enjoy a passionate affair for a few months, until her husband summons Georges and orders him to stop seeing his wife (which he does). The film ends on Yolande’s voice-over reading a letter to tell Georges she is leaving him, over shots of the Seine. In the two films, Morgan’s melancholy heroines are ‘tragic’ explicitly because circumstances conspire against their happiness, but also, implicitly, because of her ageing. Remarks such as ‘You’re not as old as all that, you know’, meant to be flattering, only reassert her age. In both Rencontres and Les Pas perdus, she ends up alone, estranged from her husband and abandoned by her lover – her disappearance from the screen in the last section of Les Pas perdus symbolically signifies the fate of the ageing woman who ‘enter[s] into invisibility’ (Jermyn 2012, 4).

Beyond the repression of her fading sexuality, the films’ tragic outcome also betrays fear of the older woman. Constance aux enfers pursues this theme. After establishing the Morgan character as a ‘sad’ ageing woman, mocked and victimised by a scheming young couple, the second half of the film details her ruthless revenge. The story becomes that of a fight between two women over a man, but also, in the tradition of the cougar, of a sexually aroused older woman who becomes ‘a predator’ (Kaklamanidou 2012, 81). The film thus combines the ageing victim narrative with, literally, that of the femme fatale.

Le Puits aux trois vérités and Les Yeux cernés go further in attributing lethal power to Morgan’s ageing female characters. In the first film Renée (Morgan) falls for the unscrupulous dandy, Laurent, played by Brialy, although through various twists of the plot, their relationship is never consummated. After insinuating himself into Renée’s antique business, he seduces her daughter, Danièle (Catherine Spaak), and marries her. Their relationship turns sour, and Danièle, sickened by Laurent’s infidelities and guessing his relationship with her mother, commits suicide. The film is told from three points of view (hence the title), that of Renée, Laurent and Danièle’s diary as it is read posthumously by the policeman (Michel Etchegarry) investigating her death. At the end, the policeman gives the diary to Renée, telling her to ‘get to know’ her daughter, implying her estrangement from her and, as a result, her guilt in Danièle’s death. In the film’s terms, as a working and sexually active woman who, in addition to her attraction for Laurent, has a lover, Philippe (Franco Fabrizi), Renée must be a bad mother. Le Puits aux trois vérités thereby adheres to a persistent theme in films about older women up to the present day that shows motherhood and sexuality as incompatible, and more specifically suggests that ‘a sexually active middle-aged woman impedes her daughter from becoming fully developed, both sexually and emotionally’ (Tally 2007, 120). Les Yeux cernés introduces Florence (Morgan) with her face hidden by a black veil as she follows her husband’s funeral in a small mountain village in the Tyrol. The husband, a prominent local businessman, was assassinated and Florence is assisting the police, with the help of one of her husband’s employees, Franz (Hossein), to whom she is clearly attracted. The characters all live in the same hotel, including Clara (Pisier), the daughter of the hotel-keepers, who is also Franz’s mistress. An erotic scene between the two is pointedly paralleled with the lonely and miserable Florence in her room. At another point, Florence witnesses Clara’s ostentatious flirting with Franz, so that when she tries (unsuccessfully) to kill him by throwing him down a ravine because he knows she killed her husband, the gesture is also readable as due to sexual frustration. We realise her black veil in the opening sequence was premonitory (Figure 6). Constance aux enfers, Le Puits aux trois vérités and Les Yeux cernés channel the crime genre to harden the portrayal of the sexual older woman into a calculating and malevolent figure, whose punishment is loneliness and, in Les Yeux cernés, arrest. Morgan was right to complain of being typecast as a tearful victim in her 1950s films, but her promotion to predatory ‘black widow’ in the 1960s hardly constitutes progress in gender terms.

Figure 6. Morgan as ‘black widow’ in Les Yeux cernés.

The punitive denouements of the five films in which the ageing Morgan engages sexually with a younger man clearly condemn the sexual power of the mature woman and express the fear of her independence at a moment when women in society were emerging as a distinct force. The films guard against her desire for emancipation, however timidly expressed, in their narrative arcs and in a few vignettes: the husband’s repressive discourse at the end of Les Pas perdus; Yolande reading a volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs in Les Yeux cernés. Indeed, the years 1960–1965 witnessed a number of social changes, in rising female employment and notably in the legal status of married women, which had been particularly restricted under the Napoleonic Code. A law passed in July 1965 began to lift these restrictions and open the door to women’s independence (Duchen 1994, 99). In the same period, Morgan’s films modernise her image, notably through showing her as a believably seductive and sexually active woman – but only to better punish her and rub in the notion of sexual attraction as a game only younger women can play. It would take almost another decade for films to register more widely women’s social emancipation. In this light, it is perhaps no wonder that Morgan’s career petered out at precisely this point.

A graceful exit: from fading star to discreet celebrity

If Morgan’s films of the first half of the 1960s had varied fates at the box office, reviewers were consistently damning about their aesthetic quality. But whether they thought the films mediocre or worse, critics across the spectrum of the French press, evidently able to make a distinction between the characters and the star, were unanimous in praising Morgan. For example, about Constance aux enfers we read: ‘Without her the story would be unbearable for more than ten minutes’ (Aubriant 1964).¹⁰ L’Aurore added: ‘What can we say about this film, except that it rests entirely on the shoulders of Michèle Morgan’ (Garson 1964).¹¹ Similarly, on Dis-moi qui tuer, ‘We learn that a great actress is not enough to make a film’ (Chapier 1965), and Le Figaro’s critic claims: ‘I suffered seeing Michèle Morgan go through this ordeal’ (Chauvet 1965).¹²

In her autobiography, Morgan is equally harsh on this period of her career: ‘From 1960 to 1965 I appeared in many films. Too many’ (Morgan 1978, 301). She attributes this predominance of quantity over quality to three factors. The first has to do with the star system. She points out that producers come up with enticing projects that often end up being disappointing. But by then, she says, the star has agreed to make the film and is now caught in a financial trap which leads her to accept other roles in the same way. As she candidly puts it, ‘You become a box-office star, you get paid big fees, and the following year you pay taxes as a result – all very normal.’ Disillusioned, she decided to put a stop to her career’s negative spiral, despite her agent warning her of the ‘big financial sacrifices’ the step would entail. Secondly, as we saw earlier, she deplores the restricted range of parts she is offered, and on viewing the films it is hard to disagree. She adds, ‘It was nice the newspaper articles hailed “the still beautiful Michèle Morgan”, very gratifying’, but ‘I needed a different choice and was not being offered one.’ And thirdly, she is aware that the New Wave had passed her by. She ascribes it to the filmmakers’ lack of funds (Morgan 1978, 301–303), but as discussed earlier, we know that the real reason is that, as a middle-aged star associated with the Tradition of Quality, she did not fit their aesthetic project, nor their obsession with youth.

Fortunately for Morgan, her film career did not quite end on this negative note. Her last two major films were singular projects that gave her an unexpected, if short-lived, burst of visibility and pleasure. In 1968 she co-starred with Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli and Pierre Clementi in Benjamin ou les mémoires d’un puceau, directed by Michel Deville. She enjoyed making this light comedy version of eighteenth-century libertinage because she played ‘a character which, without being quite the real me, no longer conformed to the Michèle Morgan stereotype’ (Morgan 1978, 303). Morgan looks magnificent in the pastel-coloured period costumes and amid exquisite decors, while her looks, diction and image are a perfect fit for her part as a refined countess, achieving an ideal amalgam between her upper-class image and the enjoyment of sexuality. Although she is – again – pitched against a younger woman (Deneuve) in pursuit of the attentions of the Piccoli character, the light-hearted tone departs from that of her numerous earlier tragic or melancholy heroines. In this film, scripted by a woman, Nina Companeez, the mature woman’s sexuality is presented as neither ridiculous nor a threat but as a source of pleasure, in line with the increased tolerance of on-screen sexuality in the late 1960s. However, despite the film’s success at the box office and critically (it was awarded the Delluc prize), she ‘awaited offers of similar parts; but none came’ (Morgan 1978, 303). As a result, there was a gap of seven years until her last major starring role in 1975. Claude Lelouch’s Le Chat et la souris is a comic, at times deliberately confusing, political murder mystery (some scenes unfold, then are shown to be in the imagination of the characters and then contradicted by a different version of the same event), with passages of semi-improvised dialogue. Morgan appreciated a narrative which gave her the opportunity to laugh and enjoyed Lelouch’s relaxed method, adding, ‘In my fifties, I was discovering a new liberty!’ (Morgan 1978, 303). The film did well at the box office, no doubt a tribute to Lelouch’s popularity and the impressive cast: Morgan co-stars with Serge Reggiani, Philippe Léotard, Jean-Pierre Aumont and Valérie Lagrange. Her contribution to the film was noticed. Le Monde was delighted by ‘a Michèle Morgan liberated from her legend, joyful, accessible, full of good humour and energy’ (Baroncelli 1975).¹³ Abroad, The New York Times recognised that: ‘The teaming of Miss Morgan and Mr Reggiani gives the film an ironic recognition of class boundaries’ (Maslin 1978). Despite these accolades and although Morgan enjoyed making Le Chat et la souris, it was too idiosyncratic and too far from her image to have left a mark on her career or indeed film history; unlike Benjamin ou les mémoires d’un puceau, the film has vanished from accounts of post-war French cinema and it does not even rate a mention in Lelouch’s recent memoirs (Lelouch and Monsénégo 2016).

Morgan’s life moved in different directions. In the 1980s and 1990s she worked for television, appearing in four television films and two mini-series, and she received retrospective film awards: an honorary César in 1992 and a Career Golden Lion in Venice in 1996. She took up painting, her notoriety ensuring her work was exhibited and sold, as she was well aware. She told an interviewer that while some people bought her work because they ‘thought it was not so bad for an amateur’, others did it ‘because it is signed by Michèle Morgan’ (Le Bailly 2016).¹⁴ She also enjoyed a long and happy relationship with the filmmaker Gérard Oury, her partner from the early 1960s to Oury’s death in 2006. For decades, the couple was a well-known presence in the French film world at ceremonies and festivals, striking a patrician, yet modern note: they positioned themselves as heads of a distinguished ‘cinematic family’ through various relations, in particular the filmmakers Tonie Marshall (Bill Marshall’s daughter with Micheline Presle and thus Mike Marshall’s half-sister) and Danièle Thompson (Oury’s daughter); at the same time they ostensibly declined to get married. The union of the elegant star with the director of some of the most popular French films of all time conjured up a perfect amalgam of classic and popular cinema, and the couple maintained a discreet media presence. This refined image was barely dented when a drug scandal involving Morgan’s grand-daughter Sarah Marshall between 2003 and 2005 brought the star into the orbit of less prestigious gossip magazines such as Gala and Voici, as Morgan publicly castigated the young woman. On the contrary, their subsequent reconciliation gave rise to a flurry of pieces applauding Morgan’s generosity in renewing contact with the renegade young woman, bolstering her status as ‘grande dame of French cinema’, a much-repeated phrase when she died in December 2016 (Le Bailly 2016).

With hindsight, Morgan’s 1960s cinematic output inevitably appears a disappointing finale to a long and stellar career. Yet the films, while of evident interest for any fan of the star, also eloquently reveal the ongoing work of building and maintaining a star persona, the topography of French popular genres in the turbulent era of the New Wave, and the importance of female stars in articulating constructions of femininity in society and the media. They also confirm that, as a female star in her forties and early fifties while she was making these films, Morgan suffered from the dearth of interesting projects around mature women, including in auteur cinema, and Benjamin ou les mémoires d’un puceau and Le Chat et la souris remained isolated experiments in trying to move away from her familiar image. As a female star of mainstream cinema, Morgan had little chance of pursuing the long career of her male counterparts such as Gabin, Fernandel and Fresnay but also Louis de Funès, Jean Marais, Bourvil and others who continued to get top billing parts in their fifties, sixties and sometimes beyond. She thereby suffered from a characteristic ‘double absence, that of being “not male” and of being “not young”’ (Biggs in Jermyn 2012, 3). Despite her beauty and talent, her prestige and connections in the film milieu, Morgan in the end paid the penalty for reaching ‘a certain age’.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ginette Vincendeau

Ginette Vincendeau is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. She has written widely on popular French and European cinema and on film stars. Among her books are Pépé le Moko (1998), Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (2000), Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris (2003), La Haine (2005) and Brigitte Bardot (2013). She has edited and co-edited numerous volumes and is currently completing a monograph on Claude Autant-Lara for MUP.

Notes

1. ‘De 1960 à 1965, Michèle Morgan tourne beaucoup avant de s’éloigner du cinéma.’

2. Raphaëlle Moine discusses Fortunat in this issue.

3. Also left out of the discussion is Dis-moi qui tuer, which, like the television work, was unavailable.

4. ‘On a pu assister à un renouvellement massif des acteurs sous l’impulsion de la Nouvelle Vague […]. Hormis Brigitte Bardot, star incontestable de l’époque, les vedettes féminines sont plus discrètes.’

5. ‘Il s’agit d’une femme jeune : pas de petite fille, deux quadragénaires et une majorité de moins de trente ans, alors que la production classique privilégie en général davantage la femme entre trente et quarante ans, âge de la “grande vedette” consacrée.’

6. ‘Personnellement, je refuserai systématiquement de faire des films avec cinq vedettes : Fernandel, Michèle Morgan, Jean Gabin, Gérard Philipe et Pierre Fresnay. Ce sont des artistes trop dangereux qui décident du scénario ou le rectifient s’il ne leur plaît pas. […] Ils influencent la mise en scène, exigent des gros-plans, ils n’hésitent pas à sacrifier l’intérêt d’un film à ce qu’ils appellent leur standing et portent, selon moi, la responsabilité de nombreux échecs.’

7. ‘Le temps glisse sur elle comme l’onde sur le plumage de la cane’ (Bory); ‘[son] visage pathétique a déjà ému deux générations’ (Garson); ‘Il paraît que c’est là le 50^e film de Madame Michèle Morgan. Eh bien ! On ne l’a pas gâtée’ (Rochereau).

8. ‘Une sorte d’égalité de fait dans le comportement amoureux, en soi révolutionnaire.’

9. The title of the film, Les Pas perdus (literally ‘lost steps’), refers to a vast hall called ‘salle des pas perdus’ in Saint-Lazare station. The films’ exteriors, shot on location, make extensive use of the hall to show the lovers meeting in the crowd.

10. ‘Sans elle l’histoire ne serait pas supportable dix minutes.’

11. ‘Que dire de ce film, si ce n’est qu’il repose entièrement sur les épaules de Michèle Morgan.’

12. ‘On y apprend qu’il ne suffit pas d’une grande actrice pour faire un film’ (Chapier); ‘J’ai souffert de voir Michèle Morgan dans cette galère’ (Chauvet).

13. ‘Une Michèle Morgan libérée de sa légende, gaie, familière, respirant la bonne humeur et la santé, qui nous ravit.’

14. [Il y a ceux qui] ‘trouvent que ce n’est pas si mal pour un amateur’ [et d’autres] ‘parce que c’est signé Michèle Morgan.’