This review is of the English-dubbed version of this 1957 film, entitled SELLERS OF GIRLS. Made in 1957 and released in the US in the early 60s, SELLERS OF GIRLS is a competently made French white slavery melodrama with a narcotics smuggling subplot. It starts off well, with a scene depicting a teenage girl in an abusive home with an unpleasant stepfather. She fantasizes about leaving home and going to Paris, which she eventually does. She is spotted by "recruiters" for white slavery, who can spot a girl from the provinces very easily, and soon she is sucked in by promises of a job. At this point, the film loses its interesting particularity and becomes a standard crime melodrama, not particularly gritty or distinctive, although it is a competently made as an early 50s Republic programmer, and like most French films of the era it features a good musical score--jazzy when the film is set in France, Latin-tinged when the film is set in some generic Latin American setting. Any viewer of foreign genre films is probably used to dubbing by now, but one problem here is that the sound effects are not synched well, which becomes a bit annoying. Other than that, this is an average French crime film (I gave it a "5" rating)and viewers intrigued by the risque title will NOT get what they are looking for. I won't give away the ending, but when one thinks the film is over, a fatalistic epilogue is added...how uniquely French!
