With Josephine Baker, a youthful spirit filled with love and warmth, and Jean Gabin in pre–Prévert flexibility, Zouzou is one of those rare musicals strengthened by the humor and pathos of its offstage story. Two children, a black girl and a white boy, are presented by their white adopted father as a circus sideshow (racially-mixed "twins"). Jean joins the navy, Zouzou becomes a laundress and, still secretly in love with her adopted brother, is catapulted into a laundry–to–riches stage success. The undiluted love of the family scenes and the bawdy boudoir humor of stage life emerge in Allégret's marvelous direction. And the film comments in subtle ways on La Baker as a symbol of le jazz hot: junior voyeurs peeping through the circus-tent window; Zouzou's first dance projected in larger–than–life shadow; and her magnificent stage entrance, locked in a cage and singing like a bird for her lost Haiti.