Winifred Bryan’s underground film career followed an earlier mainstream Montand vehicle

Evidence

The Queen of Sheba was not Bryan’s first movie. A onetime resident of Paris, she appeared eight years earlier in Les héros sont fatigués, known in English as Heroes and Sinners, which, set in Africa, starred Yves Montand as a former French fighter pilot turned diamond smuggler. “The French seem to be fascinated by those flea-bitten tropical ports, where the heat and humanity are oppressive and sex is rampant and raw,” Bosley Crowther wrote in the Times when the movie opened in May 1959, calling it “a lurid demonstration of people struggling to keep from going to the dogs, while the bongo drums beat, the natives wiggle and the vermin crawl across the walls”—a description that might almost apply to The Queen of Sheba. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1896