Signoret, Montand, Monroe, Miller: France 3 looks back on the 1st world people scandal

Hollywood, 1960. Icon Marilyn Monroe, her husband Arthur Miller and the stars of French cinema Simone Signoret and Yves Montand meet on the set of an American film.

There follows an adulterous love story between the American actress and the French actor and singer who will make the headlines of the press of the time.

With the documentary 

broadcast Monday evening, France 3 looks back on the first people scandal, but not only, on a global scale.

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The story of "two heroic women"

Guest of 

Gérard Miller wrote and narrates in voice-over the thread of this story both glamorous and moving.

According to him, the tragedy of this story is mainly due to the behavior of the two men.

"Yves Montand's problem is that he was not known in the United States at the time. For him, sleeping with Marilyn Monroe is having a history with America," observes the psychoanalyst.

"This is what is going to behave very badly in this story."

The voice-over is not much softer with Athur Miller.

"He wanted, with Marilyn Monroe, to become something other than a great intellectual. And in particular to make money. We discover in the film how much this man loved money", he reveals.

"That might not be a reproach, except that it hurts a lot. It's clear these two men didn't deserve this woman."

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According to Gérard Miller, it is the two women of the quartet who publicly take on the bad role, when the Montand-Monroe affair is made public.

“From the moment she discovers to what extent she has been betrayed, and betrayed publicly, Simone Signoret continues her life in a form of forfeiture,” he explains.

"She does not leave Yves Montand for all that. She is a heroine, and they are two heroic women."

A glamorous meeting, but also political

The betrayal is all the stronger when it is public, but it takes place within a group of friends, according to Gérard Miller, who recalls the political foundations that unite the two couples.

"These characters all dreamed of a better world. They were all four of the left," he recalls, citing in particular the communist commitment of Simone Signoret and Yves Montand.

He specifies that this engagement on the left was also that of Marilyn Monroe.

"We tend to underestimate her all the time, but she was an absolutely wonderful woman, very intelligent contrary to legend, and an anti-racist activist," he explains.

"What will found the love story is above all political sympathies and dreams of humanism, at the end of the period of McCarthyism, that is to say the hunt for intellectuals and persecution communists in the United States. "

As a sign of fate, the four characters of the documentary meet on the set of the film 

, whose American title, 

, means "

".

The documentary explores the hold of another man on Marilyn Monroe, his psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson, a time suspected of having killed him in 1962.