Manina: The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter (1952)

Aka: Manina, la fille sans voile (Original French title.)

Aka: The Girl in the Bikini (American theatrical release)

This is a lowbrow French entertainment which would now be forgotten except for one very key element: it represented Brigitte Bardot's screen debut. La Bardot exposed one of her breasts briefly, so it is also her first screen nudity.

In a brief prologue, a young student finds a Phoenician amphora on a remote island in the Mediterranean. Many years later, he learns that there was a legendary Phoenician shipwreck in the same general area, and that the sunken ship was supposed to have contained many amphorae filled with gold coins. Convinced that his own find is part of a priceless hoard of ancient treasures, he finances an expedition to return to the island and dive for the loot. Since he is only a poor university student, the only way he can get a suitable boat for the task is to make a deal with some treacherous cigarette smugglers.

When he finally gets back to his island, he finds that the little daughter of the lighthouse keeper has grown up to look a lot like Brigitte Bardot, so he begins to romance her. The captain of the smuggling boat begins to suspect that there was no treasure to begin with, and that the student is only using him and his boat to woo the sexy young woman. The elements of dramatic conflict are established. Can the smugglers be trusted? Does the treasure exist? If so, who will find it? If it's found, who will end up with it? Will the student run off with the lighthouse-keeper's daughter?

We tend to think of the French cinema as a bastion of aloof intellectualism and pseudo-art, but this film was not made for the dour-faced university crowd. This film was made into a stew for popular consumption, and it could easily have been a "B' Hollywood film from the same era if it had been in English. It includes a pinch of this and a dollop of that to entertain the masses. It is an adventure about buried treasure, and it is a corny love story, but it's also a lowbrow comedy and a musical! There is the trite background music. There are over-the-top minor comic characters like Huntz Hall - even one scene inspired by the Keystone Kops. There are scheming, chain-smoking, moustache-twirling weasels like Gilbert Roland. There is a pretty girl in a bikini. There are popular songs. There is a big musical production number.

Although Manina is a poor movie in certain ways (the corny acting and the incredibly rushed denouement), and can even be laughably poor (some truly bad use of miniatures), you might get a real kick out of this film. I did. It is truly a time capsule left for us by forgotten people who lived in unfamiliar places and times. There are some nice (stock?) shots of Paris and Cannes in the early 50s and some fascinating street scenes which really seem to have been shot in Tangiers in 1952.  For some of us older types, this film is also a look back at a naive, primitive, old-fashioned type of filmmaking which we remember from our childhoods and which will never come around again. It made me smile to realize that French people my age must have very similar memories of cheesy films, except theirs have a different cast of characters.

I'll be honest and say that I don't want to watch any more like this, but it was a lot of fun to watch one.

And the Bardot nudity didn't hurt either!

This film had a brief and limited theatrical release in the United States in 1958, six years after it was made. By then Bardot had become a major international star and the distributor hoped to cash in on her name. Given the bare breast, I suppose that it played in very few locations. A review appeared in the New York Times, October 25, 1958 edition.

By our method of grading I guess it is a C- as a French popular entertainment from the early 50s, and one that can be quite fascinating to watch. Since I have not seen anything else like it, I don't know if it is a good or bad example of what the French were doing then in terms of mass-market commercial films, but it's charming enough to rate a C- and a recommendation for curiosity-seekers at least, especially since the DVD transfer is quite satisfactory!

 

Brigitte Bardot

 

The DVD release I screened is an all-region PAL disk from Australia. I had no trouble playing it on either the dedicated Region 1 drive or the Region 2 drive on my PC. It is available from an American importer (click on image below for info).

There is also a French disc, but that transfer is not as good, it is hard-coded for Region 2, and no subtitles are available, so this Australian release is the one you want.

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Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.