Naughty Girl (film)

Plot

Handsome cabaret entertainer Jean Clery is engaged to his psychiatrist, Lili. He sings at a nightclub owned by Paul Latour which is being used as a front for a gang of forgers.

Paul has been framed and decides to go to Switzerland to find out who is really behind this. He has a daughter, Brigitte, who is at finishing school and thinks he is a shipbuilder. Paul asks Jean to retrieve Brigitte from school and look after her for a few days so she is not caught up in the police investigation.

Jean collects Brigitte pretending to be her uncle and keeps her at his apartment. While there, Brigitte causes chaos, upsetting Jean's butler, starting a fire, getting arrested for swearing and winding up in prison, and causing troubles with Jean's engagement to Lili.

Eventually Brigitte and Jean fall in love and the real crooks are caught.

Cast

Box Office

The film was a big box office hit in France, being the 12th most popular movie of the year. It was slightly more popular than And God Created Woman.

Critical

The Observer said the director "has learnt the knack of raising a simple laugh' not yet the art of touching heart and mind." The Los Angeles Times praised the "tight, high speed direction."

The New York Times said that the film:

Is full of slapstick and clumsy farce, and some oldish and splashy dance numbers. But it never piles up its effects in any one direction. Instead it keeps shifting key, from romance to melodrama to light comedy, back and forth. It presents nothing that can take the place of a serious study of Miss Bardot's form... The direction by Michael Boisrond seems rather fuzzy about whether or not Mam'zelle Pigalle should be a broad take-off on a Hollywood romantic melodrama. At the end, however, it seems this was the intention.