Review: The Bride Wore Black

Morose-looking Jeanne Moreau is a mysterious woman tracking down and murdering a quintet of sexist pigs who have somehow wronged her in the past. Michel Lonsdale is the sexist politician, Michel Bouquet is a bachelor bank clerk, Charles Denner a womanising artist, and so on. It is only as the film progresses that the audience comes to understand just what is making Moreau tick.

1968 mystery/psycho thriller from Francois Truffaut (“The 400 Blows”, “Day for Night”, “Shoot the Pianist”) with a dark sense of humour, is Truffaut’s tribute to colleague Alfred Hitchcock (even hiring Bernard Herrmann to do the music), based on a Cornell Woolrich (“Phantom Lady”, Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”) novel. It mostly works and certainly entertains, but the back-story revealed gradually through flashbacks proves unsatisfying and rather silly. Furthermore, Moreau’s victims, aside from maybe a young Lonsdale  are a pretty uninteresting lot, and mostly pretty revolting. Sad-faced Moreau is excellent, however, and the cinematography by Raoul Coutard (“Breathless”, “Shoot the Pianist”) is excellent.

Definitely a curio, many others rate it very highly indeed, but personally I didn’t see all that much Hitchcock (this is not a Brian De Palma film by any means), just a fun little film in its own right. Like “The Red Circle”, I was expecting something a little more pretentious and austere and was pleasantly surprised to mostly see a nice little genre picture. The screenplay is by Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard (“Day for Night”, the softcore classic “Emmanuelle”).

Rating: B-