According to the French, "BB"—short for Brigitte Bardot—is going to replace MM as a symbol of sex. Brown-haired Brigitte, 23, is slender but softly rounded. From the neck up, though, she looks about twelve years old, and bears a striking resemblance to Shirley Temple at that age. Her movies have smashed attendance records from Norway to the Middle East, and Hollywood has bid high for her services. So far. Brigitte has preferred Paris, where she gets about 30 million francs (more than $70,000) for every picture.
Last week, with La Bardot's most notorious film doing record business in Manhattan, and another set to open soon, U.S. moviegoers had a chance to see what all the European excitement is about. It adds up to a brouhaha in a bias cup.
And God Created Woman (Kingsley International) opens with a shot that promises a good deal more than the picture delivers. There lies Brigitte, stretched from end to end of the CinemaScope screen, bottoms up and bare as a censor's eyeball. In the hard sun of the Riviera her round little rear glows like a peach, and the camera lingers on the subject as if waiting for it to ripen. Pretty soon an aging lecher (Curt Jurgens) appears, and the two converse with only a sheet between them.
After a lot of dull plot and duller dialogue (Brigitte: "I've got a flat." Man helping her with her bike: "I'd never have suspected"), the hero (Christian Marquand) refuses to marry the girl, so she takes his brother (Jean-Louis Trintignant) instead. She does her best to make her husband's brother jealous, and the moviegoer curious—here comes that sheet again. She wraps it around her so that the husband can see what's inside and the audience can't. But by this time, the spectator, if he happens to be grownup, may not be looking anyway. If sex is the object, there is just about as much to be seen in almost any Hollywood film, and in promulgating Brigitte as a full-blown enchantress, the French have clearly sent a girl to do a woman's job.
Please! Mr. Balzac (DCA) offers Brigitte in a part appropriately cut to her girlish measure, but in a picture that ought to be cut in half. Brigitte is cast as a girl of good provincial family, who has secretly written a bestselling novel—a fact which so horrifies her father that he ships her off to a convent. Wrong train, of course, and Brigitte winds up in Paris in the company of two young journalists (Daniel Gelin and Robert Hirsch) who have no money but plenty of notions. Brigitte soon gets one of her own, and enters a striptease contest to get rich quick. It turns out to be slow work, though, especially for the audience. Most of the time the journalists seem to be doing a class-day imitation of Martin and Lewis, and though Brigitte undresses charmingly, she's just a bit too sisterly about it. Still, she's a fetching little hussy, and the language she speaks can be understood without subtitles.