Review: Naughty Girl (Cette sacrée gamine, 1956)


Brigitte Bardot delights in this charming romantic comedy of errors. The action takes place in and around a nightclub where our male lead is the star performer--think Desi Arnaz in I Love Lucy: He's got the band, the dancers, and a huge act that people come from all over to see. There's a plot about fake money being trafficked through the club and an investigation by the police, but it's all an excuse to have the club's owner leg it out of the country until the whole thing blows over, leaving his young (but sexy) daughter behind with no clue of his whereabouts. The star nightclub performer is tasked with hiding the girl in his apartment, leading to all sorts of misadventures. This is, after all, a comedy.

Ms. Bardot was 21 or 22 at the time of the film's production and her appeal cannot be denied. She gets three lavish fantasy dance sequences that would make Gene Kelly jealous, and the filmmakers take every opportunity to put her in glamorous (and skimpy) clothing. However, the film is far more innocent than English title would have us believe. As it turns out, Naughty Girl is actually Cette sacrée gamine, translated from French to "This Damn Kid." That title actually makes far more sense, because the premise of the film is that Bardot is sort of a klutz who keeps mucking things up while somehow also being irresistible. Jean has a fiancee and valiantly rebuffs the pursuits of this much younger girl, but he can't stop thinking about her--making this something of a precursor to the "manic pixie dream girl" trope. 

The film is light, but at less than 90 minutes, it flies by and is actually quite a bit of fun. Even at this young age, Bardot has the je ne sais quoi that co-screenwriter Roger Vadim (her husband at the time) sought to showcase by writing this movie specifically for her. French movies were a bit more libertine in the 1950s than their Hollywood counterparts, so this 1956 movie actually feels like the movies Hollywood would finally get around to making in the early-to-mid sixties. Not revolutionary, but recommended. 

Naughty Girl is available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

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