Taken from a story by Patricia Highsmith, director Claude Autant-Lara’s murder thriller can boast an attractive cast: Maurice Ronet, Gert Fröbe, Robert Hossein, Marina Vlady and Yvonne Furneaux. The slick production, good music and committed performances can’t be faulted, but the point gets lost amid a lot of yelling. Just the same, Hossein and Fröbe know how to enliven a scene, and the location work is a travelogue to Nice of 1963.

Enough Rope
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1963 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 116 104 min. / Le meurtrier / Street Date October 29, 2024 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95
Starring: Gert Fröbe, Marina Vlady, Robert Hossein, Harry Meyen, Maurice Ronet, Yvonne Furneaux, Paulette Dubost, Clara Gansard, Jacques Monod.
Cinematography: Jacques Natteau
Art Director: Max Douy
Costumes: Jacques Cottin
Film Editor: Madeleine Gug
Original Music: René Cloërec
Written by Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost from the novel The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith
Produced by Alexander Grüter
Directed by Claude Autant-Lara

One look at the actors featured in this murder thriller, and that of the author Patricia Highsmith, and we’re sold. After her books Strangers on a Train and The Price of Salt but before The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith wrote an overlooked murder novel called The Blunderer. Nine years later, a French film was produced, surely due to the popularity or René Clément’s superb Ripley adaptation  Purple Noon. It stars Noon’s Maurice Ronet and takes place in the South of France; the European titles were all changed to the too-generic ‘The Murderer.’  It’s no surprise that we haven’t heard of it before — its tiny U.S. release came three years later. The American title Enough Rope is actually rather good.

The oft-repeated bit of trivia attached to Enough Rope is that its persistent detective character provided the original inspiration for the U.S. TV show  Columbo. The star cast would have attracted audiences in Europe, but none of the actors were big names here — Gert Fröbe would become famous the next year, in the title role of  Goldfinger.

An audio commentary on the disc tells us that the film follows Highsmith’s original novel closely; if that’s truly the case Enough Rope would seem something of a repeat of Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. The situation isn’t exactly ‘Criss Cross’ — an accident investigation reopens a closed murder case, when evidence surfaces that the two cases are related. With two deaths to clear up, a detective encourages a clash between his two suspects in the hopes of extracting a confession.

The show has plenty of favorable aspects but also a major weakness. In Patricia Highsmith’s other thrillers, even the killers had charisma to spare. In Enough Rope we really don’t like any of the characters.

The nervous, myopic bookseller Melchior Kimmel (Gert Fröbe) is suspected in the death of his wife Helen (Paulette Dubost), but he avoids arrest via an alibi secured by a neighbor boy who saw him entering a movie theater. When the story of Kimmel and Helen’s rocky marriage hits the tabloids, it finds an interested reader in Walter Saccard (Maurice Ronet), an architect is an unhappy marriage of his own. His neurotic, insecure wife Clara (Yvonne Furneaux) has already attempted suicide once. So fed up is Walter with Clara’s accusations of infidelty with the younger Ellie (Marina Vlady,) that he starts seeing Ellie, almost as perverse revenge. Walter begins unconsciously planning Clara’s murder, using Melchoir Kimmel’s modus operandi. Clara throws a tantrum and takes a bus to visit her mother; Walter follows the bus, without any clear plan — he’s thought nothing through.

The tangle of police trouble that follows is compounded by the amateur bungling of both Walter and Melchior. Enter Inspector Corby (Robert Hossein), who reopens the Helen Kimmel case because a second ‘accidental’ death could be a carbon copy murder, at least in theory. Walter’s movements and evasions make him look extremely guilty to Corby, even if all the evidence against him is circumstantial. Corby’s gentleman investigator act fades as he pressures each suspect, tripping them over their own lies. Kimmel takes the initiative and tries to blackmail Saccard. When that fails, he goes to the press with a false story that Saccard confessed all to him … a pack of lies recorded on tape. Things become so heated that the two men can’t get together without a fistfight breaking out. Corby not only encourages this, he tries to get a confession out of Kimmel by slapping him around.

Having directed his first movie in 1926, director Claude Autant-Lara was one of the established ‘cinema du papa’ filmmakers discarded by the New Wave critic-directors as worthless, ‘invalid.’  It’s a crime that major talents like René Clént and Georges Franju were lumped together as disposable, but Enough Rope is not an easy film to defend. Autant-Lara has excellent actors to work with, but the pitch of the performances is off, and the drama is muted.

The actor who scores best is Gert Fröbe, who makes his Melchoir Kimmel into a neurotic mess. The character is never boring. Kimmel has such poor vision that we don’t see how he can operate the bookstore, let alone maneuver his wife into a dark spot for a strangling. He’s so openly a liar, we wonder why Corby didn’t bust his alibi right at the beginning.

An intelligent professional, Walter Saccard drifts into thoughts of murder almost as aimlessly as Montgomery Clift did in  A Place in the Sun. He conducts a feeble investigation of Kimmel’s murder case, leaving all kinds of evidence that will later appear to connect them as partners in crime. Walter then manages to make sure that he’s remembered at the scene of his wife Clara’s disappearance. He’s no Tom Ripley; neither Walter nor Melchior could shoplift bubble gum without getting caught. The story may be by Patricia Highsmith, but the mystery machinations are so clumsy, we’d think it was written by Jimmy Sangster.

Realizing that his two suspects hate each other, Robert Hossein’s detective Corby puts them together and turns up the heat. Corby also pulls a full 3rd-degree press on Melchior Kimmel, screaming at him, striking him, and even smashing his glasses on the floor. Corby so provokes the pair that Walter also tries to punch out Kimmel.

But we don’t know what to think when Corby goes crazy as well. He pulls his pistol on Walter, and jokes that he could shoot him in self defense. The audio commentary says that the book’s Inspector Corby is an unbalanced sadist, but the impression given by the film is that beating civilians is business as usual for a French police officer. Neither of these men is under official arrest. It hardly matters … so much hitting and screaming takes place that we lose sight of any rules, as well as any sympathy for anybody.

↖  The one sympathetic character is Ellie, played by Marina Vlady of Welles’  Chimes at Midnight and Godard’s  2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. She’s a knowing adulterer, yet is unaware of Walter’s deceptions and supports him unconditionally. Kimmel’s wife is an uncredited cameo by Paulette Dubost, she of the classic  Hôtel du Nord and  The Rules of the Game. The great beauty Yvonne Furneaux gets a poor showcase as the unhappy Clara — her impossibly beautiful eyes don’t register in B&W as well as they do in color. Forever scowling and tossing blind accusations, Clara all but begs to be murdered.  ↗

Maurice Ronet’s ill-tempered architect is no prize either. The handsome Walter Saccard is both dull and frustratingly stupid. He doesn’t seem to care that Clara’s money and his new girlfriend Ellie combine for one heck of a murder motive. We need to root for Walter, and we don’t. We find ourselves thinking back to Ronet’s superb presence in Purple Noon and in Louis Malle’s  Elevator to the Gallows.

Most of the film’s enjoyment comes from Gert Fröbe, even if his performance is a bit over the top. The lenses in Melchoir Kimmel’s glasses make his eyes pop twice as big as normal. Whenever Kimmel gets upset, his mouth twists into a grimace just like the one Auric Goldfinger wore while being sucked out the window of a jet plane.  ↓

Robert Hossein’s Inspector doesn’t come off as psychotic to us — he’s just a cop who enjoys putting the screws on suspects, and who thinks beating up Kimmel will get results. Hossein both underplays and commands the screen. He’s been a reliable asset to thrillers ever since the original  Du Rififi chez les hommes.

As a production Enough Rope needs make no apologies. The experienced cameraman Jacques Natteau filmed Autant-Lara’s excellent  Pigs Across Paris and several movies by Jules Dassin. The widescreen frame is used well enough, especially when the camera makes many delicate movements, as with one-take scenes in Ellie’s apartment hallway.

Some online reviews of Enough Rope lead us to expect an unheralded masterpiece, which it is not. It looks and sounds great, with excellent camera direction. But the dynamics of Inspector Corby’s strategy just feels chaotic, and the abrupt finish doesn’t have half the impact it ought to have.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of Enough Rope is in perfect shape, video and audio. Kino identifes ‘TF1’ as having conducted the film’s 4K restoration; TF1 appears to be a French television network. More power to Kino’s acquisition personnel: the more sources they tap for vintage Continental movies, the happier we will be.

Francophiles will love this show. The anamorphic Franscope images are sharp and well-defined and the night scenes bear excellent lighting. The exteriors put us on the streets of Nice, where the variety of cars and buses feels like a guided tour. We love it when Walter Saccard drops by newsstands, because the resolution of Blu-ray allows us to read headline text on the papers and magazines. We read one tabloid about someone named ‘Vadim’ being ‘anguished’ over something. Roger Vadim, maybe?

Composer René Cloërec scores Enough Rope almost as tightly as would Bernard Herrmann. ‘Symphonic suspense’ takes over for in every scene not dominated by dialogue, of which there are plenty. The music and the pace of the editing help maintain a pitch of excitement that the film doesn’t always deliver.

Kino adds a commentary by David Del Valle and Dana M. Reemes. In addition to observations about the filmmakers and bios of the cast, they compare the finished film to their reading of Highsmith’s original novel. An original trailer is included — it’s almost four minutes in duration.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Enough Rope
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good – minus
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent (French only)
Supplements:
Audio commentary by David Del Valle and Dana M. Reemes
Theatrical Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: October 29, 2024
(7218rope)

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