| La môme vert-de-gris Released in the USA as Poison Ivy | |
| Director: | Bernard Borderie |
| Starring: | Eddie Constantine Dominique Wilms Howard Vernon |
| Music: | Guy Lafarge |
| Cinematography: | Gaston Raulet |
| Editing: | Jean Feyte |
| Studio: | Compagnie Industrielle Commerciale Cinématographique Société Nouvelle Pathé Cinéma (France) |
| Distributor: | Pathé Consortium Cinéma |
| Runtime: | 98 minutes |
| Country: | France |
| Language: | French |
La môme vert-de-gris (French for "The Greyish-Green Dame"), released in the USA as Poison Ivy, is a 1953 French crime film.
It was French director Bernard Borderie's first film, as well as American-born French actor Eddie Constantine's. The screenplay is based on the 1937 Lemmy Caution thriller Poison Ivy by Peter Cheyney, which had been in 1945 the first title published in Marcel Duhamel's Série noire. The story involves FBI agent Caution investigating gold smuggling activity in Casablanca.
Set in Casablanca, it recycles aspects of the atmospheric noirish French films of the 1930s together with pulp-fiction American detective films of the post-war period.[1] Considered either "tongue-in-cheek"[2] or "doddery",[3] the film "utilizes all the rules of the genre, albeit without convictions: chases, fistfights, nightclubs, unusual settings, knowing winks at the public".[4]
It was a commercial success in France (3,846,158 French entries in 1953) and was followed by 7 other Lemmy Caution films until 1967, not counting Jean-Luc Godard's "incomprehensible"[5] Alphaville, a strange adventure of Lemmy Caution,[6] casting Constantine and Vernon. Constantine's enduring success started with this. This film was considered "emblematic of French postwar attitudes towards the United States: a fascination for U.S. culture tempered by fear of U.S. dominance".[7]
fr:Raymond Borde
. Chaumeton. Etienne. A panorama of American film noir (1941-1953). 2002. City Lights Books. San Francisco. 978-0872864122. 129.