Beautiful Yvette Maudet, on-and-off streetwalker aged 22, robs and knocks out the wife of a Paris watchmaker. An established, 50-year old lawyer named André Gobillot agrees to act as her defence attorney. He falls in love with her spares no effort to clear her name.
Director Claude Autant-Lara, together with usual co-writers Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost again prove intent on denouncing the hypocrisy of the ruling classes as they had done since the 40s.
This picture is also Brigitte Bardot’s 20th movie part, even if she turned into a star only two years before with And God Created Woman. But something else was at stake now. As Bardot admitted herself, “I was terrified at the prospect of shooting with Edwige Feuillère and Jean Gabin, it was the first time in my life that I had been offered a big part in a legitimate movie”. As it turned out, Gabin and Bardot got on well. In her 1996 memoirs, Initiales B.B., Bardot wrote: “Thanks, Gabin! You look like a rough diamond but you were immensely sensitive. Thanks to you, I excelled in En cas de malheur”. Unlike her performance, things in real life didn’t go that well for her. A broken heart led her to a suicide attempt.
And Gabin, who was settling into a conventional life as a farmer in Normandy, was put out by the story and by his character, an established man upset by a mid-life crisis: this was a very long way from the image he was cultivating for the benefit of his fans and his children.

Edouard Waintrop