CAT OF THE DAY 017: LA PEAU DOUCE (aka THE SOFT SKIN) (1964)

Jean Desailly plays Pierre, a married man of letters who embarks on a furtive affair with Nicole, an air hostess (played by Françoise Dorléac, sister of Catherine Deneuve). At a country motel, he puts their breakfast tray outside their room and closes the door, no doubt prepped for another round of extra-marital rumpy-pumpy.

A decade later, director François Truffaut recreated this scene in his movie about movie-making, La nuit américaine (aka Day for Night). Naturally, the kitty refuses to perform on cue.

It was in 1965, after seeing Dorléac as the femme fatale in Where the Spies Are (starring David Niven as a dapper MI5 recruit) that I developed a massive girlcrush on her. Tragically, she died in a car crash near Nice Airport in 1967. But watch her in this, or in Cul-de-Sac, or in Les demoiselles de Rochefort (singing and dancing with her sister), or in Billion Dollar Brain, and I guarantee you too will fall in love.