This anti-Soviet poster incites the French to unite against war: 'Contre la guerre. Français unissez-vous.' Another map of Europe in the film is just a basic element of décor: Likewise for these two maps, though the second one relates to the characters' desire to leave war-fixated Europe and go live in peace on a Pacific island. The irony that escapes them is that the war on which all attention is focussed is in Korea, which is on that map: There are maps of North Korea on the front pages of the newspapers that Marina Vlady unfolds: She had put such reading matter to more surprising use earlier in the film by making a dress pattern out of papers that her brother had put aside: Unlike her Communist brother she is not interested in the information displayed on her body: When she reads L'Humanité and Combat it is for news of the murder in which she is implicated. The murder reminds us of her usual reading matter: Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury, Fredric Brown's Murder Can Be Fun and Vernon Sullivan's I Spit On Your Graves are the American counter-weight to her brother's Soviet leanings. (That J'irai cracher sur vos tombes is in fact a French book - Vernon Sullivan is Boris Vian - does not stop this being a reference to American culture, of course.) An unrelated curiosity in this film is the scene where a woman, Josette, is chastised by her neighbour for not drawing the curtains at night when she undresses - the neighbour is worried that her adolescent son might see her. Josette's response, when the neighbour's back is turned, is to expose her breast and stick out her tongue. This sort of thing could only happen, I think, in a French film: A short while later Josette attempts to lure the neighbour's son into her apartment: Here Cayatte seems to have picked up a motif from the Mickey Spillane book cover, shown earlier: Josette is played by Delia Scala, on view the same year in Touchez pas au grisbi:
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