A landmark film of the postwar period, Le Diable au Corps scandalized many critics with its outspoken exaltation of physical love between an adolescent boy (Gérard Philipe) and a soldier's wife several years his senior (Micheline Presle). Many viewers consider the love scenes in this film to be the most beautiful ever filmed. Based on an autobiographical novel by Raymond Radiguet written when the author was 17 years old (he died at 20), the story was set during the First World War, but its images spoke to an entire generation of young adults who had just survived the Second. It is told in agonizing flashbacks, from a funeral procession that coincides, ironically, with the Armistice Day celebration in a French town, to the affair between the boy and the young woman, and its destruction at the hands of an unsympathetic community. Pauline Kael writes, “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.... 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.”