Hitchcock by Clement

It takes a lot of gumption these days to make a film that does not pander to youthful passion, express the abysmal views of a gloomy philosopher-director or explore assorted perversions in nude, sweaty detail. Particularly risky is the idea of filming an old-fashioned Hitchcockian murder mystery in all its creaking intricacy. That is precisely what French Director Rene Clement (Forbidden Games, Gervaise) has done in Rider on the Rain.

Thanks to Clement's superb sense of mood and control, the film skips along so briskly that the viewer forgets that two hours is a long time to spend watching an ancient contrivance complete with a menacing stranger, misleading extra corpses and mixed handbags of loot.

From a window in the Riviera resort of Hyeres, Mellie (Marlene Jobert) sees a stranger carrying a red airlines bag. He looks too creepy to be anything but a sex deviate; sure enough, he breaks into her home and rapes her. When he lingers on, she drops him with twin blasts from a double-barreled shotgun, throws his body into the sea and puts his watch and wallet in the furnace. She does not tell her husband Tony, a pilot who has the grace to be in flight while she is being pursued by a grinning, hard-eyed investigator named Harry Dobbs (Charles Bronson).

Deft Intrigue. Dobbs spends most of the movie trying to force Mellie to confess to murder; she spends most of her time trying to figure out just whom she killed. One unsure note is the convenient reason she resists Bronson's insistent interrogation: a childhood trauma has made her reluctant to confess anything. Still, Clement weaves his intrigues so deftly that such minor annoyances never seriously intrude.

The latest in a long, long line of Gallic gamines, Mile. Jobert is sometimes a bit too cool and saucy to convey the proper measure of terror, although she is just forlorn enough to be touching. In any event, Bronson more than compensates for her flaws in their sharp running dialogue. Bronson's U.S. films (The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape) have apparently typecast him as just another ugly face. Here he shows himself as perhaps the most underrated actor this side of Rod Taylor. He is the consummate inquisitor, and even as he slowly falls in love with Mellie, his thin smile retains an intriguing touch of blood-and-feathers sadism.

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