Butterfly on the Shoulder

Roland Fériaud is an ordinary Frenchman stopping a night in Barcelona. The door of the next room at the hotel is ajar; looking in, he sees a corpse. He remembers nothing after that. He wakes in a clinic he does not know and has no idea who brought him there. The doctor tells him that what he thinks he saw was a hallucination. Fériaud leaves the clinic and starts finding evidence that what he saw was real. Jacques Deray's film gets its tension not from the event but from nobody explaining anything. The man keeps asking and the people opposite change the subject rather than answer; the viewer is left as much in the dark as he is. Lino Ventura takes the lead and does not make the character a hero, only a man who is getting tired. The telling stands between a political conspiracy and a nightmare and never says which it is. Claudine Auger is in the cast.