People of No Importance

Jean Viard, a long-distance lorry driver, meets Clothilde, a young woman working at a roadside restaurant he stops at often. What is between them turns into love quickly. Jean is married and old enough to be her father; both of them know it and neither pulls away. Then Jean loses his job, his wife finds out about the affair, and Clothilde becomes pregnant. Adapted by Henri Verneuil from Serge Groussard's novel, the film tells the lives of poor working people without decoration. In a France where abortion was illegal there is nowhere safe for Clothilde to go, and the film does not turn that into a moral lesson; it simply shows it. Jean Gabin plays the man tired and silent; there is no heroism and no remedy. One of the bleakest French dramas of 1956.