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Excellent, Without a doubt!!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The other reviewers cover this film perfectly--particularly the one by DuMonteil. So will just add things that occurred to me.This film follows the lives of 4 Parisian shop-girls: one wants love one wants money etc...One problem with this film is there are too many shop-girls to follow. And a couple of them look just alike. The story line skits around and all this confuses you.It also tries to be funny and isn't--goofy zany and bizarre yes done pretty well but this isn't hard to do. The scene in the restaurant with the motorcycle rider hitting his head on the table went on far too long. Also it took me quite some time to convince myself of what happened at the end.I also like watching these to see the street scenes and cars from the era of my childhood. Recommend ?--probably not unless you are like me and like looking at the Deux Chevauxs and Panhards etc...

Les bonnes femmes (1960), directed by Claude Chabrol, was shown in the U.S. with the title The Good Time Girls. The film depicts the lives of four Parisian shopgirls. (I guess now we would call them retail clerks, but in 1960 they were shopgirls.) The women are all looking for romance, and they do no one any harm, but their lives are not filled with the glamor and excitement that the term "good time girls" evokes. They go to music halls, public swimming pools, and the zoo. They let men cruising by in cars pick them up. They stay out all night and stumble half asleep into work the next day. One of them is pursued and courted by a mysterious motorcyclist.All four young women are attractive. Three of them went on to have important careers in the French cinema--Bernadette Lafont , Clotilde Joano, and Stéphane Audran. (Audran later married director Chabrol,)Although Chabrol is a superb director, and the actors are talented, the film just didn't work for me. The young women had vacant lives, they had no aspirations or dreams of something different, and they had a naiveté that was sad rather than charming. This is a movie worth seeing if you have a particular interest in the French New Wave, in Claude Chabrol, or in the young actors who were not yet major stars. I wouldn't seek it out as casual viewing. We saw it on VHS, and it worked well on the small screen.

Just to prove that portraying males as all-negative is nothing new, see Les Bonnes Femmes: the employer with wandering hands, the drippy suitor, his bossy Dad, the snobbish fiancé, the lurking psycho, the bad-jokes bully-boy and his fatty hanger-on, the absent lad on national service. Every one of them is no good. And yet the four shop-assistants are no better, they exist only for the men. Whatever the fellows throw at them, they're up for it. It's a chilling worldview, with a cynical twist at the end, (plus a tacked-on coda that seems to be from another movie). Along the way, there's some really hammy acting from the girls' employer that clashes badly with the realistic mood, and some longueurs as the girls get bored at work and we get bored right along with them. The young Bernadette Lafont is a joy, but she fades out in Reel Three when the lovely Clotilde Joano comes to the fore. Whatever happened to Clotilde? Her subsequent career was undistinguished, and she died at age 42. This is mostly a watchable slice of Paris life from the late 50s, although the Algerians who caused so much mayhem only a few years later are nowhere to be seen.

I watched this movie by a coincidence zapping around, and I couldn't stop watching. The movie was made 4 years before I was born, but I like to see old films of this kind. And of course, the French movies of any year, always casting beautiful actresses. The story is simple, and moves very slowly forward. But maybe this is a realistic portrait of young parisiennes in 1960. It's sure gives me some feeling of the nightlife in Paris then. Clotilde Joano is "Jacqueline", who faces a tragic ending in this movie. I have tried to find out some more about this classic and beautiful actor, but the internet contains very little information beside her biography, and that she was Swiss, and died in 1974. If anyone can give me some more information about her, I would appreciate it. If you are going to see an black and white European movie this weekend, I can recommend Les Bonnes Femmes.