A young British heiress (Patricia Franklin) is kidnapped at an airport in Paris in this rather tough existentialist crime drama featuring Marlon Brando as the nominal leader of the gang of morally flexible criminals that include his drug addicted girlfriend played by Rita Moreno, her pickpocket brother (Jess Hahn) and Richard Boone at his most menacing as a pimp named Leer. They hold her in an isolated house on a desolate looking beach but discover a French police officer who likes to fish coincidentally happens to live nearby. The entire affair is heavy going with a group who thinks they can pull off this caper and avoid the underlying violence. Interesting tension develops between bad Boone and not-so-bad Brando, with Jess Hahn sort of stealing the show as a kind of non- violent pickpocket desperate just to get the money. In addition it's a pretty far way from where Rita Moreno was in West Side Story.
Review of The Night of the Following Day
