不安分的年轻人们

Bob Letellier, a middle-class student, meets Alain, a free-thinking rebel who opts for instant gratification over work and commitment. They both join a group of young Parisians, including Mic, who dreams of owning a luxury car. With Bob's help, Mic manages to find the money, but soon discovers she is pregnant. When they next meet at a party, Bob and Mic deny they have feelings for each other, leading to tragedy. Marcel Carné, known as one of the standard bearers of French quality cinema in the 1930s and 1940s, makes a film that dares to portray the attitudes and behavior of the 1950s youth, effectively capturing the mood and sentiment of the time. Les Tricheurs was a controversial film, with its blatant depiction of adolescent free-love being banned in some regions of France. It also received some intensely unfavorable reviews, most notably from François Truffaut, who cited it as a prime example of the decline of French cinema into mediocrity. Despite all this negative press, the film proved to be an astonishing commercial success, attracting five million cinema-goers and winning the Grand Prix du Cinéma français in 1958. While Les Tricheurs is not as flawless as Carné's earlier masterpieces, it is nonetheless a significant work, having the power to both shock and move its audience while having great entertainment value. It evokes the mood of its time in a way few French films of this period did, depicting young people as pleasure-seeking rebels rejecting the austerity and discipline of the previous generation while pursuing a life without cares, responsibilities, or love. Similarities with James Dean's films of the 1950s are apparent, although Carné's treatment of young people is far more abstract - in his film they merely symbolize a world that has lost its way, mostly victims of post-war prosperity. Although the young people in Les Tricheurs lack the authenticity to be totally credible, the film does make an important and indeed quite disturbing point about where the permissive society may be heading. The pleasure of the film is in the performances from its four lead actors, Jacques Charrier, Pascale Petit, Laurent Terzieff, and Andréa Parisy, although only Terzieff is really convincing in his role. Marcel Carné originally considered Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo for the parts of Bob and Alain respectively, before opting for Charrier and Terzieff. As a consolation, Carné offered Belmondo a smaller part in the film - alas too small for the actor to be noticed by the public. Belmondo's breakthrough had to wait until the following year when he starred in Jean-Luc Godard's revolutionary A bout de souffle, a film which offers a very different perspective of the youth generation.