Cinema: Chip-Happy Harpy

Bay of the Angels is a flimsy French drama about a pair of roulette addicts. Amidst some properly bleak and disenchanted views of Riviera gaming rooms, Director Jacques Demy earnestly studies the squirmings of compulsive gamblers, one of whom, grace a Dieu, is Jeanne Moreau.

The shambling plot follows a callow Parisian bank clerk (Claude Mann) who gets high on beginner's luck and decides to court Dame Fortune at the Cannes Casino. Unfortunately, he meets another dame. Moreau appears, a battered divorcee who has already sacrificed her marriage, her child, and her jewels to the corruptive religion of chance. Gambling is her life, she confesses. "Nothing else gives me as much pleasure. I just need one chip to be happy." To turn her luck, the chip-happy harpy latches onto the clerk. They win big and lose big, make love, win again, go on a spending spree to Monte Carlo and try the wheel once more. Of course, the odds are against them.

But before the film whirs to a muddled flat-broke finish, Actress Moreau forcefully demonstrates the verve, style and flamboyant femaleness that make her the envy of European sex symbols much greener in years and cooler in blood. Her wicked, winning presence has saved many a bad movie from utter oblivion, and at 36 she knows how to turn Bay of the Angels into a one-woman show. Puffy, painted, clacking along on spike heels, bouncy blonde curls screaming Miami bleach, she seems to have been blackjacked by destiny in a thousand side-street hotels. If she loses her train fare, she sleeps at the depot. If someone offers to share his room with her, that's all right too. "I'm here with you," she shrugs. "I could be somewhere else—with my husband for instance. I hardly know him. So what's the difference?" Because Moreau lifts such roles to an eminence they ill deserve, European directors continue to cast her, in film after film, as the high priestess of contemporary moral collapse. Too bad that a first-rate actress so often has to squeeze her victories out of second-rate scripts.