‘Still beautiful’: Michèle Morgan in the 1960s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Michèle Morgan’s films of the 1960s, the last phase in her long career, and one hitherto ignored by film history, largely on account of the dearth of auteur films in the star’s late filmography. Morgan’s 1960s films are explored against three contexts: the impact of the New Wave on popular cinema (in particular the arrival of youth culture); the changing social context, especially as it affected women; and the importance of age, given that Morgan was 40 at the beginning of the decade. Morgan’s films are shown to divide into two main strands: on the one hand, large-budget omnibus or ensemble films, mostly in light comic mode, and on the other hand, smaller-scale dramas in which she is systematically paired with a younger actor in a romantic relationship that is on the whole doomed. The article argues that the films’ deployment of Morgan’s star persona as the elegant bourgeois woman opposite younger actresses betrays society’s ambivalence towards the younger generation. At the same time, while Morgan is depicted as an attractive, sexually active, desiring woman in practically all the films, the narratives articulate a recurrent unease with the ‘older’ woman’s sexual identity.