Manon

Manon (1949) is a French drama by Henri-Georges Clouzot you can watch online on iFILM. Postwar Marseille: a mob is about to lynch a young woman accused of collaborating with the occupiers. Robert Degrieux, a Resistance fighter, pulls her from the crowd — and within days has lost himself entirely over her.

Manon's brother Léon is a petty hustler who treats his sister as a business asset. She gravitates toward money and comfort; Robert keeps forgiving her and slides, crime by crime, deeper into ruin trying to keep her. Clouzot transplanted the Abbé Prévost novel from eighteenth-century France to 1945, and the update makes the moral rot feel sharper — liberation-era idealism is too thin a coat to cover anything.

The film took the Golden Lion at Venice that year. Cécile Aubry plays Manon without a trace of sympathy for the character, which is exactly why she is impossible to look away from. Stream Manon (1949) on iFILM.