Jean Negulesco's A Certain Smile doesn't work. It's unfortunate because it starts off pretty good. Basically it should be a kind of intriguing story where a young woman has an affair with her fiancé's hot, rich uncle and she can't quite figure out why she finds him so compelling, but she does. And A Certain Smile starts off that way. It's intriguing and sexy for a while. And then it becomes a kind of strange moral tale. The young woman behaves very badly and ruins lots of things, and then we get a speech from Joan Fontaine about marriage or something or other.
I was with this for a little bit. Rossano Brazzi is fantastic as the enigmatic, sexy uncle. And Joan Fontaine is fabulous as his wife. (Now is the time for us all to admit, finally, that Joan Fontaine was just a much better actress than her sister, Olivia de Havilland. I don't care how many Oscars de Havilland won; it's really not even up for debate. Joan chose more interesting characters to play, and she played them better.) But then there's the film's lead – Christine Carère – who doesn't seem to understand the part and whose English is not great and who is rather wooden in the entire film. It's an interesting role, actually, but Carère doesn't know what to do with it, and the film really suffers because of this.
