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Un témoin dans la ville
1959 Crime / Drama / Thriller
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Summary
Acquitted for the murder of his mistress, industrialist Verdier returns
home one evening to face the dead woman’s vengeful husband, Ancelin.
Verdier’s long over-due execution is well-planned and swift, but when
Ancelin leaves his house, he runs into a taxi driver ordered by
Verdier. Ancelin has no option but to pursue the taxi
driver, but for some reason he finds it hard to kill him...
Review
With two successful crime dramas under his belt, director Edouard Molinaro stays
with the genre and delivers what is quite possibly his darkest and most
stylish film. Taking his inspiration from American noir
thrillers and their French counterparts - notably the policiers films
of Jean-Pierre Melville - Molinaro constructs a well-honed
suspense thriller which, despite the threadbare plot and sparse
dialogue, is extraordinarily compelling.By the late 1950s, the policier was beginning to become a tired, formulaic genre in French cinema, although still remarkably popular. Un témoin dans la ville is in a different league altogether, almost an art film, thanks to its beautifully evocative design and noir photography (one of cinematographer Henri Decaë’s best pieces of work), which give the film a sinister existentialist feel, as well as a striking sense of cold realism. Daringly, the narrative is focussed almost entirely on one character - played superbly by Lino Ventura, an ex-wrestler who had a very successful career playing hard men in films such as this. In one of his few roles as an antipathetic villain, Ventura brings an intensity to the film which makes his character’s increasingly desperate attempts to extricate himself from the mess he has got himself into utterly gripping, and with a nice touch of pathos. © James Travers 2008 Write a review for this film... |
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