The Champagne Murders (DVD)

From Claude Chabrol, the legendary director of Les Bonnes Femmes, Les Biches, Betty and L’Enfer. This stylish psychological thriller has such labyrinthine plotting that many critics, upon the film’s original release, found it too confusing. Christine Belling (Yvonne Furneaux, La Dolce Vita) tries to convince her husband’s friend Paul Wagner (Maurice Ronet, The Unfaithful Wife) to sell his venerable champagne business to an American company and asks her husband Chris (Anthony Perkins, Psycho) to persuade the stubborn Paul. While on a trip to Hamburg, Paul picks up a girl in a restaurant—the next morning, the girl turns up dead, and Paul can’t remember what happened. Chris, who becomes aware of the incident, promptly tells his wife, and she tries to blackmail Paul into signing a deal with the Americans. But when another woman turns up dead, and again Paul is the last person to see her alive, Paul begins questioning his own sanity. Legendary actress Stéphane Audran (Babette’s Feast) and great character actor Henry Jones (Support Your Local Sheriff!) co-star in this Hitchcockian thriller beautifully shot in Scope by Jean Rabier (Cold Sweat, Madame Bovary).