Le Septième juré (1962) - film review

In a moment of madness, Grégoire Duval, a respectable pharmacist, kills a young woman who is sun-bathing by a lake.  Unable to take in what he has done, Duval flees from the scene of the crime and behaves as if nothing has happened.  The murder is blamed on the young woman’s lover,  Sautral, who has been arrested and is soon to be tried before a court of law.   Learning that he has been appointed a juror at Sautral’s trial, Duval is driven by his conscious to save the innocent man.  Unfortunately, the town has already made up its mind who the murderer is and it seems that nothing Duval can do will change the outcome...

Le Septième juré manages to be both a masterpiece of the suspense thriller genre and a cleverly written satire on the corrupt bourgeois elite in France.  It is by far the best film to have been made by Georges Lautner, who is perhaps better known for his comic thriller parodies, such as Les Tontons flinguers, and run-of-the-mill policiers of the Flic ou voyou variety.  For perhaps the only time in his film-making career, Lautner shows a rare brilliance which momentarily puts him on the same level as the directors of the best crime thrillers of the 1950s, including the great Henri-Georges Clouzot.

What makes this a particularly compelling film is the quality and originality of the cinematography, which is strangely evocative of film noir and New Wave cinema at the same time, combining threatening shadowy images with unsettling artificial lighting.  The opening scene of the film is particularly effective, surpassing Hitchcock in its suspense-laden brilliance and harrowing abruptness.

Bernard Blier is no less impressive in one of his best film roles.  His performance is nothing less than a tour de force in which the actor stuns the audience with an astonishingly effective display of compassion and humanity, and this after his character commits a shockingly brutal killing which he then callously blames on his frigid wife.  It is a pity that such a great acting talent should have spent so much of his career in the shadows of stars such as Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura.

© James Travers 2001

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?