"Raymond Radiguet, a prodigy and now a legend, wrote the novel when he was seventeen; at twenty he was dead. But his account of the clandestine love affair between an adolescent schoolboy and the discontented wife of a soldier hounded the woman who was his model all her tragic life (she insisted that the precocious Radiguet had invented the sexual aspects of their relationship). Working during the Second World War, Claude Autant-Lara re-created this story of the First World War with nostalgic tenderness. His sensitive dramatization treats the affair with such delicacy that many critics consider the love scenes to be among the most beautiful ever photographed. Devil in the Flesh is perhaps the kind of wartime love story that people hoped to see when they went to A Farewell to Arms: it has the beauty and despair of lovers attempting to save something for themselves in a period of hopeless confusion. It isn't really as good a movie as people want to believe it is, but the young Gérard Philipe was so extraordinary a camera subject that despite the dozens of roles which followed, he is best known for his incarnation of the passionate, egocentric schoolboy. Micheline Presle is the woman. Grand Prix, Brussels, 1947; International Critics Prize, etc."