...And God Created Woman

And God Created Woman (French: Et Dieu... créa la femme) is a 1956 French romantic drama film directed by Roger Vadim and starring Brigitte Bardot, his then wife. Though not her first film, it is widely recognized as the vehicle that launched Bardot into the public spotlight and immediately created her "sex kitten" persona, making her an overnight sensation. It was Vadim's directorial debut. When the film was released in the United States by Kingsley-International Pictures in 1957, it pushed the boundaries of the representation of sexuality in American cinema, and most available prints of the film were heavily edited to conform with the Hays Code censorial standards. In 1999 filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich credited it for "breaking French cinema out of U.S. art houses and into the mainstream and thereby inadvertently also paving the way for the takeover in France of the New Wave filmmakers." A poorly-received, unrelated, English-language film, also titled And God Created Woman, was directed by Vadim and released in 1988.