Look fast for Hesseman, of all people, as a film director. Perhaps it is due to his humiliating love scenes with Pisier in which she tantalizes him with her long hair and two handfuls of ice! At least he seems to have retained a sense of humor about it. For some reason, Marquand is denied the same star billing as the other folks and gets lumped in with the secondary players. Other key cast members include Vallone as a barely disguised Ari Onassis clone and Gulager as Sarandon's principled boss. Sarandon gets to have the most fun, displaying everything from wacky humor to imperiousness to romance to the degradation of alcohol to even the thrill of wearing a flimsy nightgown during a thunderstorm. Beck (whose chin seems more prominent in his early scenes than at any other time in his career) fails to give his role the necessary magnetism or charisma that would inspire a woman to move heaven and earth to possess him. A bigger name actress may have given the role a few more layers, though few actresses would have been as willing as Pisier to continually doff her clothes and show off her pert bust (and more.) The very petite actress wears some downright massive heels throughout the film in order to meet Beck halfway and to show off some truly eye-popping Sharaff costumes. Pisier (who in some shots resembles a young Joan Collins) injects a fair amount of emotion into her meaty role, but still comes off just a touch lacking. From this point, Pisier is driven to bringing Beck back to her no matter what it takes and making him hers no matter what it takes, even if it's murder. When contrivances place Sarandon and Beck in the same vicinity, they fall for each other and are married, much to Pisier's dismay. Meanwhile, Sarandon is a slightly daffy, but resourceful public relations worker who's saving herself for Mister Right.

When he's shipped off, she waits for him to come back and marry her (made ever more urgent by the fact that she's knocked up), but things get off course. Unhappy with this arrangement, she flees to France where she meets up with Beck, a Canadian airman who takes her in and falls in love with her. Wasting no time in establishing the tawdry tone of the film, she is basically sold by her parents, as a youth, to a local couturier (a straight couturier?!) who is played by a hairy and repugnant Booke (soon to be famous as Boss Hogg on 'The Dukes of Hazard'!) Her father passes on the sage advise, 'Let the hand under your dress be one of gold' (one of many howlers in the movie's dialogue) as her stone-faced mother (Chauvin) looks on. In what's basically a lost genre by now (sexy, poolside page-turner spun into glitzy, big-screen epic), Pisier goes from an innocent, young French girl to a fabulously wealthy film actress in the course of about 8 years.

The book the other side of midnight