Symphony for a Massacre

Four men who run a gambling house in Paris decide to go into the drug trade. They will pool their money and buy half a million dollars' worth of goods. Bringing it up from Marseille by train falls to a fifth partner. But one of the partners plans to take the money for himself alone, and commits a murder before the job even starts. What follows is that man trying to cover his tracks and the others slowly closing in. Jacques Deray's film comes from the cold wing of French noir; violence is not what is pushed forward, and the tension comes entirely from who knows what. Michel Auclair, Charles Vanel, Claude Dauphin and Jean Rochefort are in the cast, and the writer José Giovanni is among the actors. There is a betrayal inside the betrayal as well: the wife of one partner is with another. The jazz score lightens the tone, and that contrast is what still makes the construction interesting today.