The IMDb plot summary for 1957’s Amour de Poche (aka Girl in His Pocket) credited to Keath brought a smile to my face. “A professor experimenting in suspended animation accidentally shrinks his dog and later, his female lab assistant, when she drinks the liquid by accident and shrinks to 3 inches tall. The professor keeps her in his pocket until he can find an antidote. Sometimes she’s naked, too.”
It’s the final sentence, “Sometimes she’s naked too” that’s the killer. That, really, is what Amour de Poche is about, a chance to see a pretty lady’s sexy bits, which the movie does oblige us with, once, maybe twice, depending on how sharp your sight is.
Jean Marais is the star, the big, lionheaded hunk of matinee manhood playing a scientist and professor lusted after by all his female students. Most particularly Monette, who talks her way into becoming the lab assistant of Professor Jerome, who’s working on a formula that will miniaturise animals. As Keath on the IMDb pithily summarises, at a certain point Monette drinks the formula and becomes miniaturised herself.
Tiny Monette is also inert, statue-like, just like all the animals the prof had miniaturised before. Which is handy, at least when it comes to the budget for special effects – barely any are necessary. It also means the professor can put the girl, naked by now because the formula does not shrink clothes, into his pocket and carry her around with him.
Complicating matters is the professor’s fiancée, Edith (Geneviève Page), a worldly and calculating piece of work whose daddy is something big in Jerome’s field and who, though never seen, exerts an emasculating influence on the poor benighted scientist (whose problems fit into the category marked “chance would be a fine thing”).
Monette is played by Agnès Laurent, the real star of this very French farce, who leans in doorways provocatively, piles her blond hair up on her head and gambols in the sea, once the plot takes her and the prof there, like all the photographs of young Brigitte Bardot you ever saw.
It’s easy to understand Edith’s instant jealousy when she catches even half a glimpse of this blond temptress bending over a conical flask in the lab. Easy also to understand Jerome not being able to resist her.
Marais is the well preserved middle aged guy who can still get away with getting into his swimming trunks when he does get to the beach. Think Cary Grant around the same time. The “don’t you worry your pretty little head” attitude is also familiar from Grant movies of the era.
The overriding idea in Amour de Poche is that women don’t really understand anything except clothes and emotions. When the professor discovers that Monette’s tears have the ability to re-animate his shrunken colony of ants, for example, he tries to get her to cry some more. “For you tears are a 0.033 saline solution,” she remarks. “For me they are pain. Pure pain!” Rational him, emotional her.
In many ways it’s not unlike the sort of “hilarious” scientific fantasies Disney started turning out later, The Absent Minded Professor and its ilk, and it’s possible that Amour de Poche is a template of sorts. All the main bits and pieces, characters and tropes, on display here can be found in later Disney output from whatever division was turning out the madcap, zany stuff.
Pierre Kast directs in a clean, snag-free style and like all farce it’s a portrait of people at their worst, though presented in a light-hearted and palatable way. None of the characters involved comes out of it particularly well. The same cannot be said bout the actors – they’re all very much on their game, playing scenes at lightning speed and skilfully avoiding avoiding the bear trap that British farce of the same period usually walked into. There’s absolutely no gurning.
Amour de Poche aka Girl in His Pocket – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
