Bonnes à tuer (1954) - film review

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…?

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.

© James Travers 2004

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