The first film made from a Sartre text - and the only one for which Sartre wrote an original script - Les Jeux Sont Faits, released in 1947, “is quite literally a time-capsule preserving on film contemporary French attitudes towards the recent Occupation. So soon after the war, the French were not yet ready to take on the problems of explaining, examining, justifying (or condemning) French life and behavior under an occupying power.... But they did acknowledge that they were thinking about the problem by dealing with it obliquely, retreating into historical fiction to find a parallel situation...and, as here, into allegoric fantasy....” (William K. Everson)
Micheline Presle (La Nuit Fantastique, Paradis Perdu) is featured as a society woman who is killed by her husband, and Marcel Pagliero (just previously discovered in Rossellini's Rome Open City) as her factory worker-lover, also dead. They are given a reprieve - 24 hours of life - in which to try and change their fate and live a perfect love. They of course fail, this being a Sartre vision (“les jeux sont faits” is a gambling term meaning, essentially, the die is cast); but as Mr. Everson points out, “it's a pessimistic film, but like a Keaton movie, not a depressing one since the pessimism is so taken for granted. And there are moments of particularly joyful comedy.... But in the long run, thanks primarily to the sensitivity of Micheline Presle's playing, it winds up as a love story....”
Director Jean Delannoy made films with a strong literary content; his best known work was the film of Cocteau's L'Eternel Retour (1943).