Directed by Claude Autant-Lara, In Case of Adversity (En cas de malheur, titled Love Is My Profession in the U.S.) is a French-Italian film noir about a 50ish established attorney (Jean Gabin) falling for a hell-bent blonde hottie (Brigitte Bardot).
Pic was released in France on 9.17.58, nine months before the appearance of Francois Truffaut‘s The 400 Blows (5.4.59) and 22 months before Jean-Luc Godard‘s Breathless (5.16.60).
From Owen Gleiberman’s 12.28 Bardot essay: “Looking back and watching Bardot’s movies now, you see hints and echoes of so many of the actresses who would come after her, from Maria Schneider to Nancy Allen to Dominique Sanda to Uma Thurman to Adèle Exarchopoulos to Sydney Sweeney.
“She was marketed as a pin-up, yet she was a singular presence who forged a path of sensual and spiritual fearlessness. And part of it is that she insisted, just as the Madonna of the ’80s and ’90s did, that for a certain kind of performer (her kind), sexuality was inseparable from artistry. Bardot’s eroticized projection of female identity was itself a transcendent performance. If God created woman, Bardot made you feel like she had created herself. Only time will tell if the future is female. But once she’d made her mark, the future was most definitely Bardot.
