The first story is brief and involves an elderly man (Jean Galland) who wears a mask at balls to conceal his advanced age. His plan manages to attract beauty Gaby Bruyére until he collapses from exhaustion. A doctor (Claude Dauphin) is conscripted to return the oldtimer to his loyal but disillusioned wife (Gaby Morlay).
The second tale occupies a majority of the movie. It features a brothel in a country village run by Madeleine Renaud. Her charming employees include Ginette Leclerc, Mila Pareély, Mathilde Casadesus, Paulette Dubost, and Danielle Darrieux. One day, Renaud closes shop to attend a relation's first communion in another town. The relation is young Jocelyne Jany, and her father, Jean Gabin, takes excessive yet harmless interest in the attractive hostesses, as does salesman Pierre Brasseur.
Meanwhile, the brothel's regulars are disappointed that the place is closed. They congregate at the Normandy waterfront, but the dour gathering splinters into petty but heated arguments.
The moral of the two stories is that men desire women, and will make fools of themselves to possess them, even for only a short while. The third story reverses the moral, and shows the lengths that a woman will go to in order to keep her man. This less pleasant tale involves struggling painter Daniel Gélin, who falls for hottie model Simone Simon. Simon moves in with him, and Gélin's paintings of her sell like hotcakes.
But familiarity breeds contempt, even if the lover is a luscious model. Gélin and Simon soon begin to quarrel, and he leaves her to live with fellow artist and bachelor Jean Servais. The irate Simon tracks down Gélin, confronts him, then attempts suicide, which forces the guilty Gélin to reconcile.
How others will see it. House of Pleasure was universally well received. It picked up an Academy Award nomination for its cinematography, unusual in that Hollywood prefers to honor its own. At imdb.com, the film is popular for a foreign-language black and white classic movie, despite the fact that only one bona fide moviestar is present. That would be ravishing Simone Simon, best known this side of the Atlantic for Cat People (1942) and a mesmerizing turn as a demon seductress in The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941).
The imdb.com user ratings are very high, but there is a modest decline among women viewers with advancing age. Women under 30 award the movie 8.3 out of 10, while females over 45 give a less generous 7.3. Methinks that the over 45 females would rather see the fickle painter end up in the wheelchair instead of his spurned lover. Come to think of it, so would I.
How I felt about it. The three tales are told with that worldly European manner that regards men and women as both thoroughly flawed, though in different ways. Men manage to get through the day only in the knowledge that for one moment that evening they will receive the flattering attention of an attractive women. But oddly enough, if they are bathed in such attention, they grow weary of it and seek to escape.
Attractive women, on the other hand, learn to ration their charms and divide them among many men. This requires that men must be kept at an emotional distance. Indeed, it can ruin their lives if they actually fall in love and devote themselves exclusively to one man.
Whether these lessons from 19th century France are relevant today is a different matter. Certainly, men and women marry, and often remain married. We suspect these stores are warnings of how romantic plans can go wrong. They are Aesop's Fables for the sophisticated lady and the man of the world.