Rider on the Rain

Melancolie, living in a coastal town in southern France, is attacked by a man who breaks into her house. She kills him, dumps the body in the sea and tells nobody. Soon an American stranger arrives in town and starts behaving as though he knows what she did. Rene Clement directed, from a screenplay by Sebastien Japrisot. Marlene Jobert plays the woman, Charles Bronson the stranger. The tension comes not from the killing but from what he knows and why he is pursuing her. The answer is withheld for a long time. Bronson was working in Europe in this period and the role is markedly different from his American action image; he barely uses violence at all, he only talks. Japrisot's script is built as a puzzle and the information arrives in pieces. It won the Golden Globe for best foreign film. Who it is for: viewers who like French thrillers and slowly assembled puzzles. Who it is not for: anyone expecting action; the film is almost entirely conversation.