One sure-fire way of categorizing a new acquaintance is to slip the word 'Nana' casually into a conversation on Literature. If the person associates it with a large dog, a member of the Darling household in 'Peter Pan' he is she is clearly an intellectual and worthy of a second date; if on the other hand the knee-jerk response is to a novel by Emile Zola then the person is a pretentious snob and needs to be cut off at the ankles. Apart from Christian Jacque himself two heavy-hitters from the ranks of French screenwriters, Henri Jeanson and Albert Valentin worked on this adaptation which quite possibly came about when Jacque was seeking another vehicle for his then wife, Martine Carol. No one ever accused Ms Carol of being an actress of the first rank and I certainly would not be the first to set a precedent but given the right material - as she was in Wolf Farm for example - she was quite capable of holding her own with the likes of Paul Meurisse and I for one much preferred Carol to the starlet who usurped her as the poster girl for French cinema in fact I am arguably one of a very few heterosexual males who still wonders what all the fuss was about in the case of Brigitte Bardot. The few (I think it is three) posters who have filed reports here on IMDb were all disappointed and all seemed to hold it personally responsible for the rise of the petulant schoolboys Truffaut and Godard. I certainly don't claim this version of Nana is a masterpiece but it's still light years ahead of flotsam deposited on the shore of French Cinema by the new wavelet.
Review of Nana
