The Respectful Prostitute (La Putain Respectueuse)

Video Dimensions, a company that has been releasing a series of "forgotten" European goodies, is to be commended for giving us on DVD, the complete and original French version of Existentialist guru Jean-Paul Sartre's "La P... Respetueuse." It had been available before but heavily edited. I never saw the original since, as a minor, I would not have been allowed anywhere near the movie house.The film must have been a nightmare for censor czar, Joe Breen. It not only deals quite unflinchingly with racial hatred, it is also sexually very frank, though not explicit; this being, after all, 1952. Only in Europe were they dealing with sex in a mature way. There would have been no way to watch a Hollywood movie with, say Susan Hayward and William Holden, climb in bed, have a fade out, and later watch them smoking in bed in a romantic tete a tete. Over Mr. Breen's dead body.The film deals with a N.Y. "singer/hostess" (Barbara Laage) travelling aboard a train through the American South and witnessing the murder of a black man by a white senator's son (Ivan Desny). Not to give away too much, she then has to make some very important and life threatenning decisions. Right there you have a rivetting plot.Unfortunately, the film is not without its flaws and I blame that on a French intellectual writer never known for subtlety. (If only James Baldwin had written the script!) There are so many melodramatic and unnecesary plot turns that the film teeters on a potboilerish edge. There are also too many character inconsistencies. A pity. The film also suffers from a lack of believable locale. The people sweat and the cars are all American makes, all right, but that's about it. Not one location rings true whether interior or exterior. The white senator's place of residence, for instance, is not your usual white column ante bellum mansion, but a Normandie style manor in what is obviously the French countryside. Couldn't these French intellectuals check out a couple of books at their local library to find out what the real South looked like? This is so infuriating: you want this film to be better.In spite of these major flaws, the film's impact cannot be denied just because its basic premise rings only too true. It is not an easy film to sit through, but it is nevertheless a powerful experience. So this customer gives it 5 stars for its intention, though not for its sometimes klutzy execution, 5 stars to Video Dimensions for providing us such a completely restored b&w print, and 5 stars to the legendary and smouldering Barbara Laage who sashays across the screen at her full apogee (until Bardot raised the bar). A "forgotten" import that you should "discover."