The last of three films in which Simone Signoret starred under the direction of her then-husband, Yves Allégret, Manèges is a stinging, sexually and psychologically charged portrait of the workings of class in modern French society-one in which no stratum escapes undissected. Signoret creates a memorable character in Dora, the unscrupulous gold-digger who, prodded by her mother (Jane Marken), marries the owner of riding school whose wealthy patrons she intends to emulate. A figure familiar enough in the film noir repertoire-the cold-bloody hussy-is here given complexity and put in perspective, under Allégret's analytical eye, in a narrative which never allows the character to speak for herself: we know Dora only through the conflicting descriptions of her husband (Bernard Blier) and harridan mother.
"Perhaps Allégret's nastiest touch is in his treatment of the...haughty patrons of her husband's riding academy...a purposeless, unappetizing lot; only the hopelessly stupid, Allégret implies, would wish to become part of that crowd in the first place.... Signoret submerges her own intelligence into the character's self-deluded obtuseness.... (Her) performance is finally what gives substance to Allégret's notion that, in the world he depicts in Manèges, there is nowhere to go but down." --Stephen Harvey, Museum of Modern Art