User Reviews

Highsmith 's novels are deceptive:it's hard to adapt them badly while being harder still to adapt them well.

It may seem strange that a movie called "the murderer" should be the follow-up to his accursed movie "Tu Ne Tueras Point " (thou shalt not kill") about a conscientious objector in Claude Autant-Lara 's absorbing (but including in the late fifties/early sixties many potboilers)rich filmography.

Jean Rosenthal,who translated the novel into French mistranslated the word or misinterpreted Highsmith :a blunderer is not a murderer ("Meurtrier") but a person subject to egregious gaffes :that's exactly what happens to Walter : keeping a news item , ordering a book in Kimmel's bookshop ...he worked his way down whereas he could have easily get away with it ,marry Ellie and live happily ever after ....

The movie does not possess highsmith's ambiguous side ,her talent for exploring the depths of the human psyche ;her book takes much time to take off and Walter does not meet the bookseller at the beginning of the story ;the relationship between he and his wife are much more complicated on the paper ;he does not really hate her ,the movie hints at it when he's in bed with Ellie after her death .Simply, Walter is not able to be happy .

By and large ,the first part of the novel deals with the couple, with a lot of characters,most of them have been ruled out ;only Walter's best friend remains By the second part ,a Javert-like cop plays cat and mouse with Walter and Kimmel : Highsmith reaches peaks of verbal and physical violence ,setting the draughtsman against the bookseller: the movie partially succeeds : it does not really restitute the rising hell in the police station...and we do not feel Walter's guilt complex,for even though his wife committed suicide ,is he really innocent?

Gert Froebe effortlessly blows his co-stars off the stage :he's the bestial impotent monstrous fatso depicted by the writer ;Marine Vlady is also adequate as Ellie ,a character ,who ,mainly in the book,stays aside and is not really involved in the tragedy ; when Walter is more and more a suspect ,she decidedly walks out on him (whereas in the film ,she trusts him till the very end);Maurice Ronet and Yvonne Furneaux (whose marvelous eyes did deserve color!) do a good job, but the screenwriters ,who have a good reputation though, cannot give both a real depth .On the other hand ,Hossein is miscast :.Corby is a very young slim detective , a whipper-snapper,who sharply contrasts with Kimmel 's obese body : but David is stronger than Goliath and sadistically humiliates him in an unbearable way (the scene of the glasses -repeated in the novel- is treated almost gingerly ,compared to the writer's words.)

it was not the first time Autant-Lara had tackled film noir ;the first effort saw him direct Brigitte Bardot ,Jean Gabin and Edwige Feuillère in "En Cas De Malheur" ;he seemed more at ease in Georges Simenon's world.

His directing here is just OK.The best scene is the first ,because Froebe really frightens the audience ;the glasses and the murder are somewhat borrowed from Hitchcock's "strangers on a train" (the first Highsmith adaptation for the screen ,by the way!);as is the final scene ,which,like in "the man who knew too much ,both versions) tries to integrate a murder in a concert .

"Le Gaffeur " ,sorry "the murderer " does not certainly deserve the contempt it's subjected to ;but given the quality of Autant-Lara's other works in the sixties ("Tu Ne Tueras Point " "Journal D'Une Femme En Blanc " "Le Franciscain De Bourges " ) ,it remains a minor effort.