Le Diable Au Corps

I was blessed as a boy growing up in a small Iowa town with its elm lined streets, minimal car traffic, drugstores where there were soda fountains offering sundaes and sodas to customers sitting on stools.  But more than that the smallness guaranteed sociability, and still more than that the presence of the State University of Iowa guaranteed weekly symphony concerts, a season of theater, and changing exhibitions at the museum.  Ever Wednesday afternoon I went there to see a film series organized by MoMA called "The Film 'Til Now."  Not every boy gets the history of film from its very beginnings in the course of two or so years.  Even more extraordinary as I look back on that era was the presence in this small town, albeit a university town, of a movie theater, one of three in the town, called The Capitol, which showed almost exclusively current foreign language films, or films from the late thirties, missed because of the war.  I spent a lot of time there, never more than the week in 1947, I think it was, when I was there every day to see at least once if not twice the French film "Le Diable Au Corps," which featured Micheline Presle and Gerard Philipe as young lovers, he a high school boy, she a young fiancée, then wife of a soldier at the front in 1917.  The film records their meeting, their almost immediate infatuation, the tensions of fending off family, hiding from husband, and finally their desperate parting and farewell, she by now very pregnant by the lad, and her subsequent death in childbirth, the entire drama framed by the shots of her funeral at the beginning, occasionally throughout, and as a finale to the film.  I can vividly remember my teenaged self, the same age as the character Philipe was playing, sitting sobbing throughout the film, certainly after the first or second viewing almost continuously from the moment the credits began to roll.  For some reason the film sort of disappeared from circulation thereafter or only existed in a dubbed version, who knows?, but I have yearned to see it, as it unspooled in the theater of my memory, year after year, until just now I discovered I could get a restored print from French Amazon, and somehow in my excitement and with the shakiness of old age, I seemed to have hit the purchase button much too enthusiastically because I now own four prints of the film.  Last night we put it on.  Yes? Yes? you are asking breathlessly.  Well, first off, I must say I am not seventeen anymore.  How could she, the eighty three year old viewer asked himself, just after meeting the kid agree to spend time with him, and before you know it, sleep with him, when she had a very nice looking soldier boyfriend, not to mention a French bourgeois upbringing and a stern mother all of which must have militated against her impetuosity?  Then there was the revelation, for some reason not at all apparent at the time, that the two leads who were both born in 1922, looked very much to be the same age, that is, mature persons in their mid twenties.  He was certainly not the teenaged swoon I remember him to have been, although the actor did a very fine job of projecting the adolescent possessiveness, mood swings, and all the other features of that age group which to me in my dotage make them so singularly unattractive.  It would be the teenaged look, the wistful, tentative, yet impetuously passionate sense of the moment, that had to sweep this about-to-be married woman, i.e. someone soon to enter the prison of bourgeois life, off her feet, and Philipe the actor looked just as shopworn as Presle, unfortunately.  I wasn't repelled, but I was disenchanted, and as a stern old timer more or less agreed with the mother's grim admonitions to the feckless twosome throughout the film, until near the end, and when they were settling into the realization that she had to give him up, he had to go away, that the baby had to be born as though the child of the officer about to come home from the war, and all the drama of this impending separation took place against the shouts and whoops of joy for the news of the impending armistice and the end of the war.  I started to cry again, they  were so forlorn, such waifs in the grand rush of love and destiny.  Yes, yes, love is all, passion takes the moment, I could remember my knowing this to be so in Paris even if it were not quite so easily imagined in Iowa City.