Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Best movie ever!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

If you are looking for a film to show your kids about the folly of gambling, then this film is worth your time--though I honestly think the film is trying to say the opposite! If you want to enjoy a film, then keep looking. The bottom line is that this morality tale is interesting at first but after a while it's relentlessly tedious--as the characters are about as likable as bed bugs! Claude Mann plays a simple clerk. A coworker has a serious gambling addiction and manages to convince Claude to accompany him to the casino. Claude wins and gets gambling fever. With his winnings, he's able to go on a vacation to the Riviera. There, he meets a pathetic woman (Jeanne Moreau) who has abandoned her family in order to gamble. The two hook up, have sex and gamble again and again and again. As long as they are winning, they are in love. But winning, like their love, is shallow and fleeting. And by the end, you just want them to go away....This really is all that there is to the film. The majority of the film shows them gambling. And, I couldn't care less about gambling, I couldn't care less about these unappealing characters. It really became a chore to watch after a while and although reasonably well acted and crafted, it's not particularly enjoyable or enlightening. I didn't need to see this film to know that gambling addicts are pathetic.By the way, the theme music from this film is god-awful. Too intense and too invasive and doesn't at all fit the film.

First a note of interest: Jeanne Moreau is in the movie, and she's the star, of course, but she's also a blonde here. Usually, from what I can remember from say The Lovers or La Notte or Jules & Jim it's dark or at least brunette. I wonder if she was already blonde at the time or if it was a deliberate and specific choice on director Jacques Demy's end. Because, somehow, it does add something extra to the character. When we first see her on screen she's being 'escorted' (kind word for kicked out) of a casino that Jean and Caron are at to start gambling, and it's a big scene where we see her arguing and stomping her feet and we barely see her face, just a fury of big blonde hair and attitude to match. It's not exactly the same cool presence one saw in some of Moreau's other big films of the period - and yet when we see her again she is lovely and with that face that charms immediately upon the smile, and makes one feel the gloom of after hours when looking serious.Bay of Angels is a movie that works best when Demy focuses his theme on escapism, what would appear to be at first a film for escapists, about people going off to rich places like Monte Carlo and gambling away the life savings and having a great time in expensive suits and drinking champagne. But it's also about the nature of this escapism, the danger of it. It's predictable to see that Jean, who comes from a family where gambling is incredibly frowned upon, and Jackie, who at one point confesses that going into a casino is like going into Church, will lose a lot of money, maybe all of it, and keep going in dire straits throughout. What isn't expected is how Demy interweaves this seemingly endless back and forth of the bottomless pit that is a gambler's life (if only seeming like a lifetime in however few days Jean/Jackie are together) and how touching it becomes against the backdrop of glamour. At the least, his film is about something.The only problems come with a few scenes in the script that drag - the dialog often works, but sometimes not quite enough to satisfy the emotional purpose of a scene. Maybe also contributing to this is first time actor Claude Mann as Jean. Mann would later be featured in Melville's Army of Shadows, among other notable films, but here he just can't hold his own most of the time alongside such a presence like Moreau. It was wise to cast someone young, and maybe not with the most experience, as this kid who goes on vacation from a small bank-clerk job to try and find himself by way of throwing away hundreds of thousands (albeit I pictured more-so, as the film went on, the actor who played the lead in Pickpocket). But Mann just doesn't really fit in, especially when he has to go into big dramatic scenes (i.e. the outbursts of anger against Jackie in the hotel rooms).And yet Bay of Angels displays a director with an intuition with the camera, a grace and style, and a dazzling sense of music, precisely repetitive, over the shots of the roulette table spinning around and the faces dissolving in and out with it. There are beautiful moments, and it's hard not to take eyes ever off of Moreau, one of those actresses who keeps working today into her late 70s going on 80s but whom one thinks of in black and white only. She had/has one of the great faces in movies, and she's a damn good actress to boot. 7.5/10

This film enters with a spectacular high speed tracking shot matched by the hyper circular theme song by Michelle Legrand that sounds both like spinning and falling, and which does indeed represent both the spinning of the roulette wheel and falling in love. Here we have the side of Jeanne Moreau I don't care for, posey, game playing and artificial... the kind of woman men like and women hate... and that made her perfect in this role. (And her performance her is Infinitely BETTER than in EVA, same type role.) What I like a lot about her casting here is that she looks quite a bit like Marilyn Monroe, but is as different internally as anyone can possibly be - which a lot of the world was doing at this time, being bad Marilyn Monroe wannabees. I love that the platinum hair makes her look much more harsh, older, and very false, and that is, of course, the essence of the character. And this film is mainly a character study, with little story and little explanation.Our leading man is the young naive everyman sucked into her world in all respects. We feel for his every bad decision, and this is a true and real representation of both the allure and the tawdriness of the gambling world. Without giving anything away, the ending feels contrived, but in this time period, films wanted "endings"... today a truer ending would just go on spinning like the roulette wheel. Michel Legrand's score is great. Like many of Demy's films, this is a dark story of the current day told with musicality and attention to the games we play with ourselves.

... or one of them is the movement that pseuds insist on promoting to upper-case as The New Wave and I dismiss as the lower-case new wavelet but in life we can seldom pigeon-hole everything and Jacques Demy is a case in point; he is part of the hiccup only inasmuch as his early features were made just as the vague in question was retreating back into the ocean of mediocrity from whence it came. True, he made these early movies for a stick of gum and mostly on location but he possessed more flair for actual film-making than for intellectualising on celluloid. Nor was he above subtlety; there is, for example, a nice touch in this film when Claude Mann and Jeanne Moreau share a pint bottle of whiskey and the brand is Black and White reflecting the motif of the entire film; Moreau, the car, the beach are all white, Mann, the croupiers and virtually every other male are dressed in black. Plot-wise it's stripped to the bone; Mann is a straight-up guy, Moreau is Gamblers-in-yer-face. They meet. End of. On the other hand if you want to talk Theme how much time do you have. Nice makes a nice location, Michel Legrand weighs in with a pleasant jazz-inflected score and it's fine for one viewing and just for the record another of my bete noirs is wagering against the red at roulette.