Marchands de Filles (1957)

Under the title, Le cinéma de papa, the vintage French magazine, Ciné-Girl featured a recurring item focusing on the more risqué cinema of the 1950s. The first issue published in 1977, had this two-page article on Maurice Cloche's Marchands de Filles (1957).

Involving a white slave trade racket and narcotics trafficking, the film is a wonderfully sordid evocation of these 'maisons close', and from the noirish Parisian settings to the sweaty atmospherics of South America, plays out entirely against a backdrop of sleazy nightclubs, stripjoints, abandoned docks, grimy wharfs and the seedy clutter of alleys surrounding the decrepit South American harbor, with barely dressed prostitutes lounging in every shadowy doorway. Vicious, sadistic gangsters abound with their seedy henchmen, lascivious molls, corrupt cops, chorus girls and drugged prostitutes. The film is filled to the brim with barely dressed girls roaming the backstage corridors of tacky cabarets and underwear-clad whores lingering about the dank, sweaty corridors of cheap brothels and drab boarding houses. There is a seriously tacky sequence in the whorehouse, in which an old, sweaty matron chalks up on a blackboard the amount of customers the girls have already gone through, and believe me, there are a lot of marks on that board. There are two instances of actual nudity in the original French version of the film (available on VHS tape on the René Chateau label), usually missing from the English language version, Sellers of Girls. The first concerns an on-stage strip-act, with the dancer baring her breasts for an instance before the spotlight goes dark and she is seen outlined against a lighter background. The second moment involves three naked ladies posing on a stage of a nightclub. Their act is interrupted when minions of a rival gang burst in and trash up the place. Such risqué moments where quite common in French genre cinema of the 1950s and director Maurice Cloche was no stranger to the subject matter, with movies like Les Filles de Nuit (Girls of the Night - 1958), Prisons de Femmes (Women's Prison - 1958) and Requiem pour un Caïd (Interpol jagt leichte Mädchen) to his credit.

Daniele Rocca (above) and Agnès laurent (below) with George Marchal, in two images from the René Chateau video sleeve.

Life becomes unbearable for petite Josette Legrand (really cute Agnès Laurent), living in the suffocating confines of her provincial home, mistreated by her vicious and cruel stepfather. Running away, she ends up in Paris, but alone and with little money, the discouraged girl is an easy mark for white slave traders. A fake blind woman asks her to deliver a letter to a bar, where a certain Mr. Jean seems to take pity on her and offers her a job as a waitress. But it is all a ruse to slowly gain her confidence and soon she is offered a better position in a 'respectable' nightclub in a South American harbor. Along with two other girls, Vera and Gaby, sweet Josette is shipped off to the exotic locale and arrives at Le Granada, a lush establishment ruled with a firm hand by racketeer Gofferi and his mistress, the sultry Bettina (Daniele Rocca from Freda's Caltiki - il Mostro Immortale). With the nightclub, along with a travel agency, a front for their white slave trading racket and drug running, innocent Josette is unwittingly dragged deeper and deeper into a life of vice and debauchery, until she ends up imprisoned in a sordid whorehouse in the worst part of town. As the rivalry between two gangs comes to a head, an undercover Interpol vice agent finally moves in to rescue her and some of the other girls, exposing the mysterious mastermind behind the racket in the process.