Louis Malle Collection - Vol. 1

The interviews in the extras reveal that this was an attempt to mirror on film the stylistic experiments in the original novel. The dvd includes a wonderful documentary by Malle of the tour de france

The interviews in the dvd extras explain that this was an attempt to capture on film the stylistic games played in the original novel.The dvd has a fantastic short Malle film on the tour de france

Very cool, measured pace, simple yet plausible story, fine, understated acting. Simply a classic French Film-noir, loved it. Vive la France !

The Eiffel Tower sequence on its own would make a hilarious short, in Harold Lloyd tradition. ( Philipe Noiret's sonorous voice is rich but irrelevant.) And there are skilful speeded up scenes in Paris traffic. The pace is terrific, but the cinematic ingenuity excessive, and thus wasted; the public's luke-warm reaction is understandable, and didn't match the enthusiasm of the director (in an 'Extra') and his team. The linguistic inventiveness of the book is, of course, untranslatable.

This is a very slight movie in the 'noir' tradition, a painfully obvious attempt to produce something similar to 'Double Indemnity'. It is watchable if you’ve nothing better to do but unfortunately the plot is so predictable that by about the fifteenth or twentieth minute it is perfectly obvious how it is going to play out. It has some period charm in that there are good views of Paris in the late 1950s and it is interesting to see how deserted the motorways were then, and how motels were regarded as the height of modernity. The plot is quite simply ludicrous, but with faster paced direction one might not have noticed just how creaky and unreal it is. Apart from the two principal actors the other performances range from the barely adequate to the truly awful. I've seen better acting in village-hall amateur productions. Perhaps it's not wholly the actors' fault since the script is woefully clichéd: the business tycoon, the two juvenile delinquents, the German tourists and the police are all written up as stereotypes. The music score is annoying in the extreme, its wailing adding nothing to the movie and being at times wholly inappropriate to the action. Seeing a movie like this makes one realise just how much more competently made most films are today - even the poor ones.