Thérèse Raquin

Thérèse lives above a haberdashery in Lyon with her sickly, petulant husband and her mother-in-law. She begins an affair with a lorry driver who comes to the shop. The two decide to be rid of the husband and he dies on a train. Then a sailor appears: he was on that train and saw what happened. The subject is not the murder but the shared prison blackmail creates. After the crime the lovers cannot stand each other; the mother-in-law has a stroke and can no longer speak but can still look, and remains in the house as a silent witness who knows everything. The form is rainy and enclosed. Marcel Carné lifts the novel out of the nineteenth century into the Lyon of the fifties; narrow streets and damp interiors produce the same airlessness. The source is Émile Zola's novel. The film changes the ending: in the book the pair decide it themselves, here the catastrophe arrives by coincidence, and that shift moves the moral centre of the story. Simone Signoret plays Thérèse and Raf Vallone her lover; her silent playing carries the film. It was awarded at the Venice film festival. Who it is for: viewers who like French noir and Zola adaptations. Who it is not for: anyone expecting fidelity to the novel; the film changes both the period and the ending.