LE MEURTRIER aka ENOUGH ROBE, from the Patricia Highsmith novel The Blunderer, screened at Edinburgh Filmhouse a few years ago and through sheer carelessness I missed it. My sister,a big Highsmith fan, attended and enjoyed it. So, when I got hold of a copy, sadly only the German dub, I had hopes.
It’s… OK. I was hoping Claude Autant-Lara still had great filmmaking in him in 1963, because I always hold out hope for the cinema du papa even though I love the nouvelle vague also. Peaceful coexistence is my goal.
Unfortunately, the movie is only really compelling when Gert Frobe’s onscreen. He brings the entertainment. The leading man is Maurice Ronet, a good actor but perhaps not a true star presence. Yvonne Furneaux and Marina Vlady are too one-note as unsympathetic wife and sympathetic mistress. Robert Hossein is like a second Ronet.
Highsmith was rather clearly trying to capitalise on the success of Strangers on a Train, with another story of two men with murderous impulses locked in a life-and-death struggle. Here, Frobe is a guilty wife-killer, whereas Ronet is just guilty — he feels responsible for his wife’s death, but isn’t. However, circumstances are conspiring to put him in the frame, and Hossein’s neurotic detective is determined to nail both men, but setting them against one another.
Everyone is weird and twitchy in this, but only Frobe has the equipment as actor to really run with it. Hossein’s part would have been better handed to a more nervous and inventive player. Ronet has the right kind of glumness, but it gets tiresome. A gentle melancholy was fine for LE FEU FOLLET. This is melodrama.
Frobe — shambling, gurning, sweating and myopic — an uxoricidal Magoo — can’t steal the show because he isn’t in it enough. He steals the bits he’s in, though, leaving the rest of it hanging in shreds.
Haven’t read the book so I don’t know to what extent otherwise the flaws of the film are inherent in the story — I’ve found some of the Highsmiths I’ve read — Ripley Underground for instance — simply too implausible. The problem with this one is simply that Ronet, at the centre, doesn’t hold, maybe because he’s not active enough. But Highsmith protagonists are often active in ways that are hard to figure out — even Ripley doesn’t always seem to know why he’s doing what he’s doing, and Highsmith can’t help him.
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