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MovieMail's Review
Veteran French director René Clément wasn't much in favour by the time he made this intriguing little thriller in 1970. His best-known work (La bataille du rail, the acclaimed Jeux interdits and the first screen outing of Tom Ripley, Plein soleil) was behind him, and his previous film, the star-studded and messy Paris brule-t-il?, hadn't helped. But he followed it with something that played to his strengths: a tale as slippery as its title suggests, full of carefully placed visual detail and with a screenplay by Sébastien Japrisot, now better known for his novel A Very Long Engagement.
A stranger arrives in an off-season Riviera resort; he stalks and rapes a local woman, Mélancolie 'Mellie' Mau (Marlène Jobert), who shoots him and disposes of his body. Enter Charles Bronson as Harry Dobbs, another stranger, who makes it clear to Mellie that he knows what she did. A cat-and-mouse game ensues, with the gamine Jobert holding her own against Bronson at his most sphinx-like and menacing.
The surfeit of Death Wish sequels has rather obscured the quality of Bronson's earlier work; Rider came only two years after his career-topping performance in the Sergio Leone classic, Once Upon a Time in the West. In both films, it's Bronson's unreadability that gives his presence such an edge: we have no idea whether or not to root for him. Perhaps European cinema back then was better than Hollywood at playing with moral ambiguity - although one of Clément's strongest influences was Alfred Hitchcock, whose Marnie sets up a similar dynamic between Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren. This pairing, however, is slightly more equal, though no less volatile. Marlène Jobert plays Mellie as pragmatic and resourceful. It's quite fitting that Jobert's daughter, Eva Green, played a particularly clever Bond girl in Casino Royale.
This great-looking DVD release gives you both the English and the French-language version, and it's worth checking out both to see how the different languages affect the atmosphere of the film. For my money, hearing the dialogue in French (even with Bronson's voice dubbed by another actor) gives the whole experience a certain... well, je ne sais quoi.
Features both French and English language versions.
Film Description
A Hitchcockian suspense thriller that received unanimous critical acclaim and which adds one plot twist after another, deliriously confounding the audience at every turn. Bronson, at the peak of his powers, plays arrogant investigator Harry Dobbs, on the search for a serial killer. When his path leads to a woman in a small French village the plot becomes a fiendish puzzle as a bizarre psychological game of cat and mouse unfolds.
