The Bride Wore Black

Two years before making this film, Truffaut was conducting his lengthy interviews with Hitchcock, published in a book I’ve owned for several years but have only begun reading after viewing this film. It’s clear Truffaut admired his work for some considerable time, but this seems to be his first film in that vein, and having reacquainted myself with Hitchcock briefly I’d like to revisit this to see just how he may have exploited or adapted the ‘rules’ explicitly set forth in the course of their conversations. For that matter, I’m long overdue to revisit Hitchcock himself: he was the first major filmmaker I looked at in some depth as a movie fan, and I’ve hardly reconsidered him since that early green stage.

In any case, on first and superficial glance this is a wonderfully exciting film, striking a kinetic balance between Truffaut’s flowing, subjective camera and Moreau’s ice-cold, perfectly centered performance as a widow remorselessly hunting down the five men involved in her groom’s killing on their wedding day. The entire set-up for the film is preposterous, not only for what that brief synopsis tells but for the fuller explanation that comes halfway through the film. Indeed, the real circumstances of the murder, and the improbability of her task, diminishes the film somewhat: one wishes her husband had been implicated in some clandestine spy ring as he would have been in a wartime Hitchcock, any absurdity in preference to this logical impossibility. In the course of a first viewing, I wasn’t much bothered by it; the episodic revenge sequences are too delightfully staged, giving the audience all the glee of the chase and resolution where Moreau remains resolute and impassive, punctuating her deeds with the simple act of ticking a name off a list. The ending is wonderfully satisfying (although does not follow the Hitchcock ‘rule’ about staying one jump ahead of the audience: one sees it coming, but there’s pleasure in following it through). All in all one of the two or three most purely enjoyable Truffaut films I’ve seen.