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Vadim's And God Created Woman is the point of departure, the joke gives Alain Delon the Bardot treatment. The chiseled moocher on assignment, retrieving a magnate's wastrel son (Maurice Ronet) on a Mediterranean carouse while scheming to replace him, just the kind of gorgeous cypher to reenact Narcissus at the pond with a Roman mirror. "Why bother having money when you can spend other people's?" The playboy treats his girl (Marie Laforêt) cruelly but not as cruelly as he treats the potential usurper, who gets banished to a dinghy during a yachting trip extensively reworked by Polanski in Knife in the Water. The switcheroo is merely a theorem until a card game gives way to a stabbing, a forger's way with signatures and passports comes in handy when slipping into a new identity. "It seems complicated. You'd get caught immediately." "Not necessarily. I might not look it, but I've got lots of imagination." A glazed streamlining of Patricia Highsmith by René Clément, a cinéma de papa attempt at modish amorality half-beguiled and half-alarmed by its slippery protagonist. Using a hotel wall like a canvas for practicing his victim's autograph, murdering an inquisitive bon vivant (Billy Kearns) then munching on boiled chicken not far from his corpse, a jet-setting Norman Bates on a travelogue tear, "quite a prankster." (When the psychopath struggles to dispose of the stocky dead man, Clément can't resist the Hitchcockism of a pair of Jesuits sauntering by.) Fra Angelico becomes a stack of glossies, yet a stingray at the Neapolitan fish market reflects the modern sinner's flat smirk. The bronzed torso that blisters in Eastmancolor, the objet d'art turned bludgeoning weapon, the perfect Delon visage disrupted by an eye twitch. "That'd be naughty of you," hence the old puritanism in macabre guise for the stinger. The best response is Chabrol's Les Biches, unless it's Donner's Nothing but the Best. Cinematography by Henri Decaë. With Elvira Popescu, Erno Crisa, and Frank Latimore.
--- Fernando F. Croce |