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The Adulteress (Hakim; Times Film) sounds as if it might be pornographic. It is based on Emile Zola's early novel, Thérèse Raquin, a somber slice of life that was called pornographic as soon as it came out. Neither book nor movie is. Written with Naturalist Zola's unfailing passion for the sordid underside of reality, the book showed how illicit love led to murder, how murder turned love to hate, how hate led to plots of new murders, and how a couple of suicides ended the whole bloody business. The movie plucks the story from the hands of fate and throws it into the lap of chance. It moves the locale from the Left Bank of the Seine to the wrong side of the Rhone, where an impassioned Lyonnaise beauty (Simone Signoret), bored with an inadequate husband, meets "un homme, un vrai" in the form of an Italian truck driver (Raf Vallone). The lovers do not plot the husband's death, but they kill him anyway. After that, accidents keep following each other as if in mockery of Zola's thesis that the punishment must sprout from the seed of the crime.