The Man Who Loved Women (L'Homme Quie Aimait Les Femmes) (1977)

Bertrand Morane, the main character in director Fracois Truffaut's 1977 film L'Homme Quie Aimait Les Femmes (The Man Who Loved Women), has a problem: he's a sex addict.  Bertrand absolutley can't get enough.  He wants to get to know and sleep with just about every woman he meets. Bertrand loves them all: young, old, single or married, it doesn't matter.

Morane is an engineer who works in a laboratory testing the aerodynamics of airplane designs.  When he's not working, he seems to do nothing but read or chase women.  Bertrand has a fetish for women's legs and feet.  When he sees a woman with legs and feet that he likes, he'll go to any lengths to meet her.  For instance, Bertrand runs his own car into a concrete pillar to claim that a woman he saw hit him so that his insurance company will run her tag.  On another occasion, Bertrand, a bachelor, calls a woman advertising as a baby sitter so that he can get her over to his apartment.  When Bertrand is diagnosed with gonorrhea, he cannot remember the names of the six women he has slept with in the past twelve days.

Bertrand begins writing a book, which he calls The Skirt Chaser, which is his version of Casanova's diaries and details all of his relationships.  When he brings the manuscript to the typist, the typist is so shocked, that she refused to continue typing the book.  When he submits the book to a publisher, the male editors think that it is garbage but Genevieve, a female editor, fights for the book to be published.  Almost immediately upon meeting him in person, Genevieve also becomes one of Bertrand's lovers.

Bertrand likes a shapely store mannequin

After the publication of his book, Bertrand sees two women with beautiful legs and darts across a busy street to meet them and is hit by a car and seriously injured.  In the hospital, when he sees the beautiful legs and shoes of his nurse, he is driven to try to get up from bed, and rolls out of bed and dies.  His funeral, which opens and ends the film, is attended by a huge crowd of women whom Bertrand had made love to.

Bertrand shows one of his "friends" how he likes her hair.

The movie is actually much better than the description of it makes it sound.  Bertrand is a pretty sympathetic character, and some of the women he seduces seem to be more in control of the situation than Bertrand.  There is a whole back story that Bertrand's mother had a whole string of lovers and, therefore, Bertrand can't handle a committed relationship.  There is a scene, when Bertrand is on a date in Paris with his editor, Genevieve, when he runs into a  woman that he once lived with.  There is much regret on both sides that things didn't work out.  The woman shows a willingness to try to get back together, but Bertrand rebuffs her advances.

Bertrand with his editor the lovely Genevieve (Brigitte Fossey)

Although it sounds really bad,  I liked The Man Who Loved Women a lot.  The films stars Charles Denner, Brigitte Fossey, Nelly Borgeaud, Genevieve Fontanel, Leslie Caron, Nathalie Baye, Valerie Bonnier and Jean Daste.  Reviewer Vincent Canby, reviewing the film for The New York Times in 1977 said L'Homme Quie Aimait Les Femmes was a "supremely humane, sophisticated comedy that is as much fun to watch for the variations Mr. Truffaut works on classic man-woman routines as for the routines themselves."

The crowd of all female mourners at Bertrand's funeral

The film was the subject of an American remake released in 1983 which starred Burt Reynolds and Julie Andrews which bombed at the box office.  The Bad Catholic gives the original French film Four Out of Five Stars.

TRUFFAUT'S DAY FOR NIGHT (1973)

Day for Night (La Nuit Americaine) released in 1973, is famed French director Francois Truffant’s homage to movie making.

This is a movie about making movies.  Truffaut plays Ferrand, the director of a melodrama called Meet Pamela (Je Vous Presente Pamela) about a young man whose father abandons his mother and runs off with his hot young wife.

The action in “real life” among the cast and crew mirrors what’s going on in the film.  The actor who plays the jilted husband in the movie, Alphonse (played by Jean-Pierre Leaud), is sleeping with the script girl who he wants to marry.  But Alphonse’s girlfriend runs off with the stunt man leaving Alphonse devastated.

The sexy leading lady, Julie (played by Jacqueline Bisset), had a nervous breakdown and an affair with her doctor who left his wife and children to marry her.  When Alphonse freaks out over his girlfriend abandoning him Julie sleeps with him out of sympathy.  Mistaking this for true love, Alphonse calls Julie’s husband back in the United States and tells him that their marriage is over.   Needless to say, Julie almost has another nervous breakdown.

Severine (Valentina Cortese)

Alphonse’s on-screen father is played by Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) an aging leading man and sex symbol who is, a la Rock Hudson, secretly gay.  The jilted mother played by Severine (Valentina Cortese)  is an aging Italian bombshell who has turned into a sad alcoholic with a son who is dying of cancer. 

   

We see all aspects of movie making: sets, trick camera shot, stunts, fake snow and on location shooting.  There is a cat who fails to like the milk out of the saucer on cue. We also see aspects of the behavior of movie crews like recreational sex.  The title “Day for Night” refers to the process where a scene is shot in daylight using a filter to make it look like night.  Called “day for night” in the U.S. and Britain, in France the technique is known as La Nuit Americaine or “American Night.”

Ferrand (Francois Truffaut) and crew on the set of "Meet Pamela"

According to Roger Ebert, “Francois Truffaut (1932-1984) was one of the most beloved of filmmakers, a man whose own love of film was in such details as the old-fashioned iris shots he borrowed from silent films (That’s a shot where the screen seems to screw down to circle one detail, before going to black). . . Truffaut was a founder of the New Wave generation – French film critics who celebrated Hollywood’s veterans in the 1950s and then made their own films. . . . In 25 years he directed 23 films. Why did he make so may? I think because he loved to be on the set.  The young actor in “Day for Night” is heartbroken after his girl runs off with the stuntman.  Truffaut’s character consoles him: “People like us are only happy in our work.”

I enjoyed Day for Night a lot and would definitely recommend it.  It’s currently available on DVD and on Amazon Instant Video.  I watched the movie in the original French with subtitles.  The film was released in the United States in a dubbed English version.