Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Teddie Blake The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

maksquibs With his short CV, Henri-George Clouzot is known only for his international hits, WAGES OF FEAR and DIABOLIQUE, yet every newfound title turns out to be a near masterpiece. This updated take on the infamous Prevost tale (operatic versions include Auber, Massenet & Puccini) is a notch below breathtaking 'finds' like QUAI DES ORFEVRES, LE CORBEAU and his striking film of the Verdi REQUIEM. But on its own terms it's ingenious & effective, perfectly fitting the story into the morally ambiguous climate of post WWII France.As the heedless young beauty who loves the rich life when she should love her besotted spouse (and vice versa), Cecile Aubry makes an appalling & devastating French sex-kitten, admittedly, an acquired taste. Michel Auclair, in Gerard Philipe mode, is very fine as her tormented husband and Serge Reggiani as Manon's amoral brother is beyond praise. And who but Clouzot would have the chutzpah to merge Manon's exile to a group of Jewish refugees trying to smuggle themselves into Israel.NOTE: This title is currently unavailable in ANY video format. Is there no justice?!

Bob Taylor I can imagine that Clouzot took on the task of filming this classic with a lot of trepidation: it's just not his kind of story. A picaresque novel of 1734, with aristocratic ideals in conflict with a sordid story was not going to be well-handled by a director who pioneered the noir form in France. His forte was telling a gritty story with characters stretched to the breaking point (as Montand and Vanel were in Wages of Fear). It required a great deal of updating and tinkering with the basic story before Clouzot could feel comfortable with it.Cecile Aubry does not impress me with her acting skills; she mainly pouts and sighs her way through the picture. How much more could Danielle Darrieux or Micheline Presle have brought to the film! Michel Auclair was a superb leading man who made many films, this is one of his best (see him also in Maigret et l'affaire Saint-Fiacre). Here he manages to convey desire, murderous rage and exasperation with Manon's whims. Dora Doll and her big toothy grin, as well as Gabrielle Dorziat as the prim madam of Manon's brothel were good, but Serge Reggiani as Manon's brother stole every scene he was in.

newbear I have seen this film a long time ago, perhaps in 1958 at Prague Film School (FAMU). It still haunts me, unlike many, many other entirely forgettable "movies", I would love to have a copy. The film has an essence of what my generation lived, what my children have forgotten, and what we are powerless to remind them of.

Dave Godin MANON may well be Clouzot's misanthropic riposte to the terrible injustice he suffered in post-war France when he was accused of making a "collaborationist" film, LE CORBEAU, and subsequently barred from working in the French film industry for five years as punishment. (LE CORBEAU is in fact the only film that I know of made during the Pétain era that presented any sort of subversive threat to that collaborationist regime; one which, let it not be forgotten, was officially recognised by the USA, the Soviet Union, and The Vatican).It is as if Clouzot wanted to show both the depths to which humans will sometimes sink in order to pursue their own personal well-being, (collaborating with evil), as well as the greater moral outrage of war and its aftermath, which never somehow seems to eclipse or exceed society's trivial and self-righteous moral preoccupation with human sexuality. It is a film about survival in a society which has become brutalised and desensitised by war, where racketeers, gangsters and prostitutes resort to any means or method as they ruthlessly take the measure of the hypocrisy of the dominant ideology and act in kind. Totally apolitical, feckless and bereft of any human sympathy for anyone but themselves, they become a bleak and grotesque underclass that has taken "the rules of the game" to its logical, hideous, and heartless conclusion.Manon, the central character, is not so much slut turned prostitute, as prostitute turned slut. Dehumanised by the experience of the war and the cruel retribution that subsequently scape-goated women whose only "crime" of collaboration was to have sex with German soldiers whom their own government had described as "guests", (and which are now re-written into history as "occupiers"), she sees sex as a means to an end; her only available weapon in her own personal war of survival in a cruel and cynical world.But, although to all intents and purposes she has long since convinced herself that she has consciously extinguished any kind or compassionate part of her nature, or human fellow-feeling she might once have had, it returns with an ironic and cruel vengeance when she meets someone whom she really loves. Like Lulu in PANDORA'S BOX, the first and only time she shows a genuine acte-gratuite of human kindness, her fate becomes sealed, and this "weakness" becomes the very means and vehicle by which she will meet her downfall. As a heartless tart she can make it, but as a vulnerable loving human, she is doomed.When she and her lover flee as illegal immigrants to try and find happiness in Palestine, she is shot in the desert by marauding Arabs, and dies in the arms of her lover; one of cinema's most powerful and memorable scenes in which he buries her corpse in the sand, but cannot bring himself to finally cover her face.Originally banned in the UK but passed with cuts by the London Council, (even then, they ordered no less than 10 cuts in the film's trailer!!), it has, as a result, become a forgotten and lost film, and if remembered at all, (as is so often the case in these matters), it is for the "controversy" it caused when it was new, despite the fact that it was awarded The Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. A gesture which, I suspect, also reflected the jury's contempt for the post-war injustice meted out to Clouzot over LE CORBEAU.Clouzot was one of the world's most gifted directors, and all his films merit not just one, but several viewings, and MANON is one of his very best.