The Girl in the Bikini

                   
                 
Director:  Willie Rozier
Year:  1952
Rating: 5.0
Country: France
Aka - Manina, The Lighthouse Keepers Daughter

There isn't a lot of drama or suspense in this film but what it does have is a 17-year old Brigitte Bardot in only her second film. It is shot in black and white and she has yet to take on the sexual persona that was to become her trademark. Without the bright blonde hair and  fully developed figure that would come along within a few years, she seems to just be an innocent teenager completely unaware of the effect she has on men in particular when she is in a bikini. In 1952 the bikini was still a very controversial item with France banning it on beaches in 1949. This film wasn't shown in the USA until 1958 because of moral codes. But other than the bikini this is a story of young love. With buried treasure.



Gerard (Jean-François Calvé) is a law student who hears a lecture on the sinking of a Phoenician ship with gold over two thousand years ago. It makes him recall that five years before he had been vacationing and had discovered an ancient amphora. He gets it into his head that this lost gold is near where he had been. A little crazy as amphoras can be discovered all over the Mediterranean.  My father had one from Turkey.  But Gerard goes off to Tangiers in order to find a boat that cigarette smugglers use and convince the owner to buy into his dream. He does manage to do that but the owner (Howard Vernon) always looks a little shady. And he is Howard Vernon, an actor who appeared in lots of Jess Franco films usually as a villain I believe.



They go off of an isolated island where the daughter of the lighthouse keeper is on top of rocks looking over the water in her bikini. It is Bardot finally. Bardot is listed first in the credits but doesn't make it on screen till the 40 minute mark of an 85 minute films (IMDB has it at 76 minutes which may have been the American version). Gerard looks for buried treasure by day and a different sort of treasure by night. Nothing too surprising happens here and it begins to feel as if this was drawn from some myth about greed and love. There are a few good songs in the film and a great bar room fight in Tangiers. It just needed a little more energy and less predictability. And more Bardot.