Cine-criminology

Enough Rope. In a proper French suspense thriller, the question is less likely to be whodunit than who'll-be-undone-by-it. Here, nearly every member of a fine, worried cast is slowly undone when Veteran Director Claude Autant-Lara (Devil in the Flesh) begins to philosophize on film about the complex, overlapping nature of guilt. Putting the squeeze on a crafty plot from a novel by Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train), Autant-Lara seemingly distills a number of small, disturbing revelations and holds each one up to the light, testing for color, clarity and body. The results are heady vin de table, if not quite vintage stuff.

Rope's most striking asset is Gert Frobe, as a pig-eyed book seller who peers through inch-thick spectacles and proves to be a barrel of rare old felon in the very first scene. The night is dark; Frobe approaches a woman seated alone on a bus at a rest stop somewhere between Nice and Grasse, drags her into a small park and stabs her. The victim is his wife, and Frobe has such an airtight alibi that the murder case would be swiftly closed except for a rich young stranger (Maurice Ronet), who is interested in uxoricide for its instructional value. Caught between a neurotic wife who won't give him a pleasant word or a divorce and a delectable mistress (Marina Vlady) who will give him just about anything, Ronet begins to hang around Probe's bookshop, asking questions.

Oddly enough, Ronet's wife soon has reason to leave Nice on a bus. He follows her by car, but at the first rest stop she vanishes. Next morning her body is found at the bottom of a ravine. The coincidence of two dead wives materializing at bus stops piques the interest of Inspector Robert Hossein, a sadist who practices police brutality with chilling Gallic esprit. Soon accusations and counteraccusations begin to ricochet off the walls. Having committed a fairly perfect crime at the outset, Frobe takes murderous pride in his achievement. Though Ronet is guilty only of intent to murder, he feels responsible for his wife's suicide.

This sort of mea culpa colloquy sounds at moments like a quartet of Paris cab drivers divvying up the honors from a four-way crash. But Enough Rope, despite one or two lapses in its logic, never loses its head en route to an ironic final twist.

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