ABSTRACT
Indeed, Clement’s new film is taken from a “novel” by Francois Boyer that one might very well consider a short story: Secret Games. This book has a history. Its author had first conceived it as a film script. Then, for want of a producer, he fleshed out the script and published it as a novel. Appearing in 1947, Secret Games received almost no notice in France, but it was translated into English and became one of the year’s best sellers in America. I don’t know whether this unexpected success drew Clement to the book or whether it simply made it easier for him to gain approval for filming from a producer: in any event, the script had become a novel, and then was adapted back into a screenplay. Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost were asked to write the adaptation. In fact, however, their work focused less on the novel than on Boyer’s original script, which was already entire ly in dialogue-form. This dialogue is largely retained in the film (as well as in the novel), and it would only be fair to point out that the credit for it
should be given to Boyer, not to Aurenche and Bost, as most critics (myself included) had at first thought. I must say that the publicity for the film had led us to think that way.
