A Kiss for a Killer

In Nice a wealthy widow is taken with the attentions of a young man; he marries her and begins to manage her fortune. Before long he starts an affair with her secretary, who turns out to be far more ruthless than he had reckoned. The film gives the deception not as a matter of feeling but as a calculation of interest, and who is using whom keeps changing places. The account was adapted from a novel and works with the moulds of French crime cinema of 1957. It does not draw the widow as a simple victim. The wealthy circles of Nice form the ground of the story. It ends with the man who laid the plan caught inside the order he built. Henri Vidal and Mylene Demongeot appear in Henri Verneuil’s hundred and five minute French film, completed in 1957.