The story, set in Paris and Southern France, of a teenager, Cecile (Jean Seberg), who connives to break up the romance between her widowed playboy father (David Niven) and his lover (Deborah Kerr), and winds up engineering the older woman's death instead, Bonjour Tristesse is adapted from the novel by Françoise Sagan, but it is pure Preminger. It was received as an embarrassing failure by mainstream critics in 1958, but was revived in the sixties by auteurists in France, Britain and New York, where Andrew Sarris wrote, “far from being a merry Gallic romp (it) is transformed...into a tragedy of time and illusion.” In a daughter-father bond reminiscent of that in Angel Face, Preminger frames his heroine's hollow victory in the stark black-and-white of present-day Paris, compared to the vivid Technicolor of the scenes on the Riviera. His haunting final shot of Seberg mechanically applying cold cream to her mask-like visage looks forward to one of the film's most important legacies, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, whose similarly destructive Seberg character is based on Preminger's Cecile. “I could have taken the last shot of Preminger's film,” Godard writes, “and started dissolving to a title, ‘Three Years Later...'.”