At a French railway station a woman bids goodbye to a friend. Then she boards the train—and sneaks out on the other side of the platform. A classic Hitchcock opening for a film that is missing only one vital ingredient: Alfred Hitchcock. In the maestro's place, however, is his greatest disciple, Director Francois Truffaut, who considers Hitchcock "an artist of anxiety" to be placed alongside Kafka and Poe.
In The Bride Wore Black, Truffaut has Gallicized a novel by American Mystery Writer Cornell Woolrich and remade it in his own images. As revealed in a series of shuffled flashbacks, the groom and the bride (Jeanne Moreau) trip happily down the steps of a church and smile at the wedding party's photographer. A shot rings out, and the new husband falls. Five men are responsible for the killing, a group of drinking and hunting cronies who played with a gun until one of them accidentally became the trigger man. The thought of revenge becomes an idée fixe as the bride pathologically tracks down the handful of murderers. Before the kill she tells them who she is, and the phrase, "I am Julie Kohler," comes to have the chilling quality of a fanatic's political slogan.
Unlike Hitchcock's films, Bride has no overriding buildup of tension leading to a climactic finish. Instead, Truffaut provides a whole series of suspenseful crescendos—and finds voluptuous revelations and eerie beauty in each one of them. Under his low-keyed, meticulous direction, all the murdered men give subtle performances that would do credit to Giraudoux. Out standing is Michel Bouquet, pathetic yet loathsome as a pawky, balding bachelor who cannot believe his good fortune when a mysterious beauty comes to his shabby room with a bottle of strange-tasting liqueur. Scarcely less memorable is Charles Denner, a painter who poses Moreau as Diana the Huntress and gets an arrow in the back. Or Claude Rich as a womanizer who smirks curiously at Moreau until she pushes him off a balcony and his face turns from pure narcissism to pure terror. Another director might have made the balcony scene an urban one; Truffaut stages it along the Côte d'Azur, where Photographer Raoul Coutard makes the outside beckon like a Cezanne landscape. Even a minute role played by a little boy is observed with special insight. When Moreau puts on glasses and tries to con the boy into accepting her as his teacher, he reacts with an air of whimsical gamesmanship; it is a put-on, he decides, and who knows more about put-ons than little boys?
It is with Moreau herself that the director achieves his finest work. She has always had trouble juggling erotica and neurotica, and some of her latest films (Viva Maria, Sailor from Gibraltar) have made her seem to be slipping. With Bride she regains her stature as one of France's major actresses. As she approaches each deadly assignment, Moreau exhales a melancholy resignation that gives the scenes the inevitability of a tribal rite, at once primitive and sophisticated.