Dedee

Yves Allégret's film is usually remembered as the one that launched Simone Signoret. Dédée works in a nightclub on the Antwerp docks, where the doorman Marco is both her pimp and a man running deals of his own. When something starts between her and Francesco, the Italian captain of a cargo ship she meets by the water, she begins to imagine a way out of this life. Jacques Sigurd, Allégret's regular writer, did the screenplay. Between them they take the poetic realism of Carné and push it much closer to American film noir, and much further from any faith in human nature. Prostitution here is not local colour but a job with no exit.