La menace (1961)

I watched this movie in the theater, as a kid, in original time it came out. There were 2 showrooms with daily projections each, every 2 hours, one on odd the other on even hours.

Alain Corneau's La menace plays out a cleverly-conceived scheme - a protagonist (Yves Montand's Henri Savin) implicated in two non-existent crimes: the first a suicide in which his lover is implicated through coincidence; the second an elaborate ruse he devises as a route to freedom, but which works all too well, bringing him down through vigilante justice. Given all the complications, the film has relatively little dialogue, focusing primarily on action, from large-scale stunts on mountain highways to endless small manipulations: the typing of a faked letter, self-inflicting incriminating scratches, manipulating the hands of a clock and so on, the irony being that the underlying motive usually differs from the kind of malign set-up we're used to in genre movies.

Copyright 1977 by Les Productions du Daunou. Co-produced with CanaFox.