Le Diable au corps (novel)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Wikipedia
Featured:  |
Le Diable au corps (Eng: The Devil in the flesh) is a French novel by Raymond Radiguet, first published in 1923.
The story of a young married woman who has an affair with a sixteen-year old boy while her husband is away fighting at the front provoked scandal in a country that had just been through World War I. Though Radiguet denied it, it was established later that the story was in large part autobiographical. Critics, who initially despised the intense publicity campaign for the book's release (something not normally associated with works of literary merit at the time), were finally won over by the quality of Radiguet's writing and his sober, objective style.
In 1947 Claude Autant-Lara released his film Le diable au corps, based on Radiguet's novel, and starring Gérard Philipe. Coming just after World War II, the movie caused controversy in its turn. Among the other cinematic versions of Radiguet's story, the heavily adapted one by Marco Bellocchio, Il diavolo in corpo (1986), became notable as one of the first mainstream films to show unsimulated sex.
