A trip through the archives...

I've spent part of the evening playing a game of 'what was on release' on this day x number of years ago and looking through the archives of the New York Times. Exactly sixty years ago to the day the review was of a French film, Devil's Daughter, which had been released in 1945, but only got to the United States a few years later. I can find very little real trace of this movie on the web. The director Maurice Saurel gets an imdb page for being a production manager! It shows the fragility of the medium; not just the actual physical decay of celluloid, although that danger is very real, but how easily hundreds of films fade from our collective memory. In contrast here is the review of a comedy which was released fifty years ago next month and, to slightly contradict its famous final line, may be one of the most 'perfect' ever made.