We Are All Murderers

André Cayatte practised law before he made films, and this 1952 picture aims squarely at the French machinery of capital punishment. He wrote it with Charles Spaak. The man at its centre was pulled into the Resistance during the occupation and trained to kill; when the war ended he went on applying what he had been taught, and he is sentenced to the guillotine for it. The film does not try to absolve him. What it stages instead is the waiting: condemned men in a cell who are never told when their turn will come, and a door that opens one morning without warning. Its argument is about what the ritual of execution does to everyone involved. It took the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1952.