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Manges is a French film directed by Yves Allgret and released in 1950. The film stars Simone Signoret married at the time to Allgret, although the marriage came to an end soon after, Bernard Blier and Jane Marken. It is shot in blackandwhite in film noir style, with extensive use of flashback and the voiceover of characters unspoken thoughts. Manges is noted for the exceptionally harsh and cynical manner in which Allgret delineates the characters of his two female leads, and has been accused of being misogynistic in tone.
Robert Bernard Blier, a riding school owner, and his wife Dora Simone Signoret have a seemingly happy marriage until Dora is critically injured in a road accident. Robert and Doras mother Jane Marken rush to the hospital to which she has been taken. Believing she is about to die, Dora spitefully asks her mother a vulgar, tawdry and heavydrinking woman to put Robert in the picture regarding the true nature of the marriage, so that she can die gloating over his distress.As Dora is taken to the operating theatre, her mother takes vicious pleasure in informing Robert who has been reflecting with sadness about happy times and the prospect of losing his wife that the marriage has been a sham from the start. Via a series of flashbacks, it is revealed that Dora is a manipulative, conniving and amoral golddigger. Encouraged by her equally unprincipled mother, she set out to snare Robert purely for access to his finances in order that she and her mother, to whom she has siphoned off significant amounts of money could live a life of ease and outward respectability. In fact she has always despised Robert, mocking his unsuspicious nature and gullibility while amusing herself with a string of lovers. With the riding school business recently failing, Dora had decided that she had taken Robert for as much as she could, and had been planning to leave him for Franois, a richer lover who could further her socialclimbing ambitions. ........
Source: Wikipedia
