Le diable et les 10 commandements (1962)

English title: The Devil and the Ten Commandments

Seven episodes each of which purports to provide an ironical view of one or more of the ten commandments. (1) a handyman at a convent who has the habit of cursing reencounters his old school chum who is now a bishop visiting the convent; (2) two married women, one rich and the other poor, are mad about jewels; (3) a seminarist vows to avenge his sister's death which he attributes to the evil influence in her life of a pimp and drug dealer; (4) a man claiming to be God arrives at a small farm; (5) a medical student learns that his biological mother abandoned him as an infant and is now a famous actress; (6) a bank cashier is victim of a robbery on the last day at his job; (7) the handyman and the bishop from episode 1 are playing cards on a Sunday and recollecting their school adventures.

It is a pleasant watch, and occasionally makes some fine observations about the moral issues associated with the commandments. However, on average it is a bit bland and some of the stories just do not illustrate adequately the respective commandments. The only ones that do it satisfactorily, in my opinion, are numbers 1, 5, 6, and, combining several commandments, number 2. Number 3, although not bad in itself, has only a trivial relation with 'Thou shalt not kill'. Number 4 artificially inserts, as an element of connection with 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me', a pagan monument which has little relation with the main plot. In number 7, it is not clear that the characters are violating the commandment in question (but I am no expert in such judgments).

Two of the stories were adapted only a little time before to TV episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, namely, number 2 (Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat, uncredited) and number 6 (Profit-Sharing Plan, probably, here in a loose adaptation).

Rating: 50