". . . And God Created Woman"

Roger Vadim’s sunlit, splashy 1956 melodrama, which turned Brigitte Bardot (his wife at the time) into an international star, is playing this weekend in the “French New Wave Essentials” series at the Museum of Arts and Design, programmed by the Museum of the Moving Image. The series is terrific. (Full disclosure: I’m presenting “Vivre Sa Vie” there on August 1st.) I talk in this clip about what this movie has to do with the New Wave.

One of the supporting actresses, Marie Glory, who plays Bardot’s mother-in-law, died earlier this year at the age of a hundred and three. The Telegraph’s obituary tells a good, sad story: She made her name as a silent-screen diva, then starred in many movies in the nineteen-thirties, but she fled France in 1939 to avoid working under the German occupation. She worked actively for the Free French throughout the world, but when she returned to France after the war, her moment had passed; she never had a lead role again, and she eventually opened a beauty salon in Paris.