Pierre Chenal belongs to that band of French directors - though technically he was Belgian - who turned out a solid body of work mostly in the thirties/forties/fifties and are now all but forgotten, think of people like Marcel L'Herbier, Albert Valentin and you'll know what I mean. Personally I've always had a soft spot for Chenal's L'Alibi though some find it has dated badly. L'Assassin was arguably the last decent film he made though he did make two more, the second as late as 1984, that needn't detain us here.
This is our old friend the Black Comedy and it's as fine an example as most. With a genre like this you need a central hub from which to spin off the mounting improbabilities and in this case that hub is Paul Meurisse, a composer with a deadline to produce a symphony and a noisy garage beneath his window. He thinks he's solved his problem when he meets, purely by chance, a pious air-head, Maria Schell, who offers him the use of her rural retreat as you do to complete strangers. He takes her up, naturally and this, equally naturally, is only the beginning of his troubles. There's a beautifully wacky take on the scene in lots of thrillers when someone shoots a guy then puts the gun in the corpse's hand to make it look like suicide. In this case, Meurisse, exasperated by Schell's father, Noel Rocquefort, who cheerfully insists on building a boat noisily, takes a hammer and beats him to death, unintentionally of course, then realizing he's gone too far, puts the murder weapon in the victim's hand but the topper comes when an 'expert' called in by the police declares that Yes, you could top yourself with several blows from a hammer where they would do the most good. And this is in the first thirty minutes after which it continues to spiral out of control for another forty five minutes or so. Definitely worth seeing.
This is our old friend the Black Comedy and it's as fine an example as most. With a genre like this you need a central hub from which to spin off the mounting improbabilities and in this case that hub is Paul Meurisse, a composer with a deadline to produce a symphony and a noisy garage beneath his window. He thinks he's solved his problem when he meets, purely by chance, a pious air-head, Maria Schell, who offers him the use of her rural retreat as you do to complete strangers. He takes her up, naturally and this, equally naturally, is only the beginning of his troubles. There's a beautifully wacky take on the scene in lots of thrillers when someone shoots a guy then puts the gun in the corpse's hand to make it look like suicide. In this case, Meurisse, exasperated by Schell's father, Noel Rocquefort, who cheerfully insists on building a boat noisily, takes a hammer and beats him to death, unintentionally of course, then realizing he's gone too far, puts the murder weapon in the victim's hand but the topper comes when an 'expert' called in by the police declares that Yes, you could top yourself with several blows from a hammer where they would do the most good. And this is in the first thirty minutes after which it continues to spiral out of control for another forty five minutes or so. Definitely worth seeing.