L’Assassin connaît la musique... (1963) - film review

Lionel Fribourg is a musician who is desperate to compose his own symphony.  For that reason, he needs peace and quiet, but his Parisian apartment is so noisy that it is impossible for him to write a single note.  By pure coincidence, he meets Agnès, a woman who lives alone in a big house in the country.  They start a relationship and Lionel quickly realises that her peaceful house would be perfect for him.  However, there is a problem.   Agnès’s father, Monsieur Devillard, intends to come and live with her.  The man is a carpenter and his only interest is in making boats, which he does very noisily.  When Lionel pays Devillard a visit, he realise that the man doesn’t like him and will be his eternal enemy.  So why should he not kill him?  Alas, this will only be the first in a series of murders...
© Willems Henri (Brussels, Belgium)

Like other film directors who started their careers in the late 1930s, Pierre Chenal had to change with the times, and dark films like L’Homme de nulle part, L’Alibi and La Foire aux chimères made way for the crime dramas of the 1950s and 60s, films like Rafles sur la ville, Les Jeux dangereux and La Bête à l’affût.  For his penultimate film, Chenal was inspired by Fred Kassak’s novel A Cottage and a Murder.  Transformed into a fine black and white crime-comedy, the film is not representative of Chenal’s filmography.

We see the great Paul Meurisse perfectly cast as ’the murderer who knows the score’.   Meurisse, who was considered the most snobbish actor at the time, plays a character who is seriously funny, with a cynical twist, and will do it several times between 1962 and 1965.  The choice of German actress Maria Schell to play an Alsatian woman is totally obvious.  Maria, sister of the actor Maximilian Schell, was also perfectly capable of handling a role in French, as she showed in such diverse films as Napoléon, Gervaise, Une vie and Le Diable par la queue. It is also worth mentioning the presence of two other marvellous actors in second roles: Noël Roquevert and Jacques Dufilho   No wonder the film gets a 3 star rating and can be found on DVD.

© Willems Henri (Brussels, Belgium) 2012

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