RIP Brigitte Bardot

From Bosley Crowther’s 1957 review of …And God Created Woman in The New York Times:

This round and voluptuous little French miss is put on spectacular display and is rather brazenly ogled from every allowable point of view. She is looked at in slacks and sweaters, in shorts and Bikini bathing suits. She wears a bedsheet on two or three occasions, and, once, she shows behind a thin screen in the nude. What's more, she moves herself in a fashion that fully accentuates her charms. She is undeniably a creation of superlative craftsmanship.

The location is the quaint town of St. Tropez, with its mellow, pastel-colored houses against the blue of the Mediterranean Sea. And the outstanding feature of the scenery is invariably Mlle. Bardot. She is a thing of mobile contours—a phenomenon you have to see to believe.

From Peter Bradshaw’s tribute, published yesterday, in The Guardian:

In the 1950s, before the sexual revolution, before the New Wave, before feminism, there was Bardot: she was sex, she was youth, and, more to the point, Bardot was modernity. She was the unacknowledged zeitgeist force that stirred cinema’s young lions such as François Truffaut against the old order. Bardot was the country’s most sensational cultural export; she was in effect the French Beatles, a liberated, deliciously shameless screen siren who made male American moviegoers gulp and goggle with desire in that puritan land where sex on screen was still not commonplace, and in which sexiness had to be presented in a demure solvent of comedy. Bardot may not have had the comedy skills of a Marilyn Monroe, but she had ingenuous charm and real charisma, a gentleness and sweetness, largely overlooked in the avalanche of prurience and sexist condescension.