Contempt (Le Mépris) (Rome Paris Films, Les Films Concordia, Compagnia Cinematografica Champion, Inter, Interfilm, Marceau-Cocinor, 1963)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 9) my husband Charles and I ran a Blu-Ray disc of a truly odd movie from 1963: Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, which both the English-language distributors of this movie and Google Translate render as Contempt. I first heard of this movie in Fritz Lang’s interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in their book The Celluloid Muse. The stars are Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, and Jack Palance, and the story deals with a U.S. producer who comes to the Cinecittá studio in Rome to film an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey with Fritz Lang, playing himself, as the director. Godard also cast himself as Lang’s assistant and the film’s real-life cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, as the director of photography for the film-within-the-film. Early on in the movie, Charles said, “You didn’t like Inception and you wanted to watch this?” Contempt was based on a novel by Italian author Alberto Moravia called Il Disprezzo, which also means Contempt (though other sources have given the name of Moravia’s book as A Ghost at Noon, the title of the first English-language edition), and the basic plot is that boorish American producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance) has come to Italy to bankroll and supervise Lang’s film of The Odyssey (which once again begs the question of why in the early 1950’s Lang, who’d proven his spectacle cred with Die Nibelungen and other epics in the early 1920’s in Germany, was given cheap little noir thrillers like The Blue Gardenia and The Big Heat while fellow German expat Henry Koster, a quite good director for romance and comedy but hopelessly out of his depth in mega-movies, pulled big spectacle assignments like The Robe, Désirée, and The Virgin Queen). Lang’s recollection of Godard’s working methods was quite different from what he’d been used to in both Germany and the U.S.; he said, “I will never forget a four-page letter to the producer which he’d interpolated in the script [which Godard wrote] in place of a scene in which Brigitte Bardot is supposed to take a bath. ‘Dear Mr. Producer,’ it said in effect, ‘I cannot tell you how this scene will play, what the characters will say, or even what chairs they’ll be sitting in … .” I could hardly believe my eyes, accustomed as I was to the American method of strict adherence to a given shooting script.”

Basically Contempt is a romantic quadrilateral in which Brigitte Bardot plays Camille Javal, wife of Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), a moderately successful writer of crime fiction who gets hired by Jeremy Prokosch to rewrite the script of his mega-production of The Odyssey (an unexpectedly au courant plot point given that at the moment Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey is one of the two top-grossing movies in the world – and the other, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, also stars Tom Holland, who plays Odysseus’s son Telemachus in The Odyssey and Spider-man, a.k.a. Peter Parker, in Brand New Day). Along the way he has to deal with Prokosch’s lousy ideas for changing the story, mainly by having Odysseus and his wife Penelope (who in Homer’s original was a model of faithfulness, angrily turning down the suitors who asked her to marry them on the ground that Odysseus was obviously dead after having been away that long) on the outs with each other. In fact, Prokosch suggests to Paul that Odysseus fought in the Trojan War in the first place only because he wanted out of his marriage, and that was the reason he was taking his own sweet time getting home to Ithaca, too. Paul also has to deal with Prokosch’s not terribly secret interest in Camille, who for no particular reason except that she’s a woman in a Jean-Luc Godard movie changes from faithful wife at the beginning to nagging harridan who makes it clear that her attitude towards her husband has changed to, you guessed it, contempt. I don’t know, not having read Moravia’s novel (not that I’m in any hurry to), whether the fault is his or Godard’s for making the reasons for Camille’s sudden change in attitude towards her husband so maddeningly unclear. A recurring problem with Godard’s work is his rather diffident notions of human nature; in his first film, Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) (1960), which I described in a previous moviemagg blog post from 2022 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/07/breathless-lies-films-imperia-les.html) as “a thoroughly unpleasant and annoying story about two small-time losers who talk a lot about having sex – both with each other and with other people – but never actually do so, at least as far as we can see on screen,” the characters seem more than a bit “off,” never coming across as actual, believable people.

I remember seeing a few Godard movies in the early 1970’s I actually liked, including One Plus One (1968), in which he did a documentary-style film about The Rolling Stones recording their masterpiece, “Sympathy for the Devil,” interspersed with scenes involving a preposterous character named “Eve Democracy” (Godard’s then-wife Anne Wiazemsky) in vignettes illustrating the political and cultural conflicts of the 1960’s; and Vladimir and Rosa (1971), which effectively dramatized the Chicago 8 conspiracy trial and tweaked the story so two of the defendants were also verité filmmakers making a movie about the trial even as they were in it. (This was produced by a short-lived company formed by Godard called the Dziga Vertov Group, after the pioneering Russian documentarian of the 1920’s, and while Godard denounced Vladimir and Rosa as a fatally compromised film, a fiction film forced on him by his financial backers and an interference with the “purity” he wanted that the Vertov Group would only make documentaries, I remember it as vividly entertaining and politically provocative.) Alas, I’ve been singularly unimpressed by the Godard films I’ve seen since then, including this one. Godard is quoted as saying on this film’s imdb.com page that Contempt was his one compromise with the studio system and the world of big budgets and major stars, and he later said he’d hated making it. (An article in the August 14, 1963 Variety about the making of the film suggests shy; though the total production budget was reported as $1 million, half of that went to Bardot as her salary; another $200,000 went for the movie rights and to pay the rest of the cast, and $100,000 went for insurance, leaving just $200,000 for actual production costs, including Godard’s own compensation.) At the same time imdb.com’s “Trivia” page on this film said Godard’s original casting idea for this film was Frank Sinatra (in which role, Piccoli’s or Palance’s?) and Kim Novak, but they turned it down. Later one of Godard’s producers, Carlo Ponti, offered him Sophia Loren (Mrs. Carlo Ponti) and Marcello Mastroianni, but Godard turned them down. Apparently Godard tried to link the plot of Contempt with that of The Odyssey by saying the film was “the story of castaways of the Western world... who one day reach a mysterious island [Capri, one of the locations for the film-within-the-film], whose mystery is the inexorable lack of mystery.” If that was supposed to be the link holding the film together, I missed it completely; the parallel I thought we were supposed to get was between the inane changes Prokosch wanted to make in the plot of The Odyssey and the otherwise inexplicable collapse of Paul’s and Camille’s marriage.

In writing the above I called Contempt a “romantic quadrilateral” rather than a “romantic triangle” because of the fourth character, Francesca Vanini (Giorgia Moll), who it’s variously hinted is Prokosch’s secretary, his assistant, his continuity person (what was then called a “script girl”), and his interpreter, since of course he knows only the most rudimentary French and doesn’t know any German, Frltz Lang’s native language. Francesca is really the only sympathetic character in the movie, and there are hints of romantic interest between her and Paul – though if you think that’s the reason Camille is losing interest in Paul, that’s way too normal a motivation for a film like this. Eventually Camille walks out on her husband and accepts Prokosch’s offer of a ride from Capri back to Rome, but along the way [spoiler alert!] there’s a car crash ex machina in which they both die. Paul quits the production to write a play since he’s already told both Camille and us that live theatre is his first love, and the final scene shows Fritz Lang directing Odysseus’s homecoming, with the still seas off Capri standing in for those off Ithaca. Frankly, I was wondering how they were paying for this with the money man dead. Along the way we’ve got a gorgeous CinemaScope and Technicolor tour of the wilds of Capri, including Prokosch’s preposterous house, complete with an outside flight of stairs with no banisters (something I notice in these mobility-impaired days of mine!) that forms part of its roof. (The house was actually built in 1937 and the architect was Adalberto Libera; the person he designed it for was Italian writer, filmmaker, diplomat, and war correspondent Curzio Malaparte.) Also along the way Fritz Lang gets to make his famous comment that the CinemaScope wide-screen process (actually, Contempt was shot in a similar wide-screen anamorphic process called Franscope, ironic since CinemaScope’s original inventor was a Frenchman, Henri Chrétien) is suitable only for “snakes and funerals.”

It was a joy to see Fritz Lang in a movie – I’ve long regarded him as the greatest director of all time, even though in his 1997 biography Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, Patrick McGilligan painted such a negative picture of Lang the person that, thinking of Christina Crawford’s infamous portrait of her adoptive mother Joan Crawford, I joked it could have been called Director Dearest – but he’s just sort of there. Apparently Godard really admired Lang, even though the two had almost nothing in common as filmmakers. Contempt was a real disappointment at least partly because, like quite a few more recent films, it has nobody in the dramatis personae (except for Francesca) we really like. Ironically, it might actually have been better if Godard had injected more of his Left-wing politics into it and made the Jack Palance character an avaricious Trump-like capitalist monster who believed he could buy literally anything and the Bardot character a femme fatale who wantonly and for rational, if evil, reasons dumps her milquetoast husband (who was apparently even more milquetoast in Moravia’s novel) in favor of the boorish American moneybags producer. If Bardot hoped that the prestige of working in a Godard movie would help her establish her reputation as an actress and not just an animate sex doll, she had another think coming, though she walked away from it with half a million dollars in salary after having delivered an O.K. performance in a virtually impossible role.