Devil in the Flesh

In France during the First World War, Marthe works as a nurse in a military hospital while her husband Jacques is at the front. A relationship begins between her and François, who is too young to be called up, and neither of them hides it; the town sees it and talks. François struggles with jealousy while Marthe tries to prove how committed she is. Her pregnancy complicates everything further. Claude Autant-Lara adapted it from the novel Raymond Radiguet wrote in 1923. In a country just out of the war and treating its veterans as sacred, a soldier's wife committing adultery was found intolerable; twenty minutes were cut from the film, and at a screening in Brussels in 1947 the French ambassador walked out of the room. Jean Cocteau defended it. It was also the part that made Gérard Philipe's name.