Bonnes à tuer
1954 Thriller / Drama
Credits
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Summary
Late one evening in the heart of Paris, crowds gather around a dead body on the Champs-Elysées.
Evidently, someone has fallen from a great height. A few days before, the journalist
Larry Roques is moving into his new penthouse apartment overlooking the whole of Paris.
Despite his humble origins, through a combination of good fortune, opportunism and dishonesty,
Larry has become a wealthy man. To celebrate his success, and his forthcoming marriage
to the heiress Cécile Germain-Thomas, he invites the four women in his life to
an evening dinner party at his new apartment. His first wife Constance accepts the
invitation, in spite of the fact that she loathes his bad character. His second
wife Véra also turns up, but with a terrible presentiment that the evening will
turn out badly. She is suing Larry for divorce and it would be convenient if she
were to meet with an accident. Naturally, Cécile will be there, along with
Larry’s former mistress, Maggy. Véra’s hunch is indeed correct.
Larry is intending to murder one of the four women. But which one – and why…?
Review
Henri Decoin directed this suspenseful psychological thriller, his eighth collaboration
with his former wife, the actress Danielle Darrieux. With some sinister film noir
style photography and very effective use of flashbacks, Bonnes
à tuer compares very well with some of Hitchcock’s better suspense
thrillers and it certainly ranks as one of Decoin’s most compelling and stylish
works. Four glamorous women and a deliciously villainous Michel Auclair have no
difficulty holding our attention, thanks to a well-crafted script with an ingenious plot
(a novel twist on the whodunit idea, where the identity of the murder victim
is unknown). The film was based on a successful novel “Follow as the Night”
by the distinguished American thriller writer Pat Mac Gerr.
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