“Manon was a prostitute who cared only for money and made her lover, Des Grieux, share this mania. Their love is defined by one of the key speeches in the film's dialogue: ‘Nothing is disgusting when one is in love'; Manon says this when Des Grieux discovers that she has just sold herself to some old man.... Love is represented in Manon with masochistic and perverse resignation and Evil is represented as inevitable and almost desirable.” (Georges Sadoul) Clouzot updated Abbe Prevost's eighteenth century novel, Manon Lescaut, to a contemporary setting; the film offers, by way of backdrop, rare glimpses of recent French history--the Resistance, the Liberation, the Paris black market, and the illegal emigration of Jews to Palestine. Sixteen-year-old Cecile Aubry stars as Manon, and Michel Auclair as the enslaved lover she drags out of the Underground, through the underworld into the gutter.