Although screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere is best-known for his close association with Luis Bunuel during the last 20 years of the latter's life which produced some of his greatest and best-loved work, he did not work exclusively within art-house circles or with highbrow material. Indeed, he was as prone to adapt for the screen famous literary pieces as he was pulp fiction. In fact, between 1969 and 2001, he worked 11 times with one of French cinema's expert purveyors of crime thrillers, Jacques Deray – although, to be sure, even this significant collaboration included forays into Balzac and Zweig! Anyway, BORSALINO (1970) was Deray's most popular film and that was co-scripted with Carriere as was the star-studded U.S.-based thriller THE OUTSIDE MAN (1972). To counter the cheeky machismo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and the gloomy romanticism of Alain Delon, there came the brooding intelligence and, on occasion, the sheer brute force of Lino Ventura; he had debuted in Jacques Becker's GRISBI (1954) in a supporting role as the villain of the piece but soon graduated to leading roles as the anti-heroic gangster on the run of Claude Sautet's excellent CLASSE TOUS RISQUES aka THE BIG RISK (1960) and the patriotic leader of the French Resistance of Jean-Pierre Melville's marvelous ARMY OF SHADOWS (1969). A measure of the world-weariness of the roles he generally played can be gleaned from the knowledge that, even though he worked and lived for most of his life in France, the Italian-born Ventura never applied for French citizenship!
The film under review is a slow-burning but eminently satisfying Kafkaesque thriller with Hitchcockian overtones in which a man (Ventura) disembarks into a Spanish port and, when checking in at his usual hotel, hears some groans coming from the next apartment and gets knocked out cold for trying to be a good Samaritan. He wakes up in a strangely deserted rest home whose only inhabitants seem to be an inquisitive mousey psychiatrist, a flabby janitor and an elderly patient forever speaking to a butterfly on his shoulder which is, Harvey-like, visible only to himself. Returning once again to collect his things from the hotel, he happens to overhear a conversation between the concierge and the dead man's wife (Laura Betti) and, when he offers to help in clearing up the mystery, she is run down by a speeding car – but not before having passed on to Ventura a key to a luggage locker. The "McGuffin" in this case is a suitcase which everybody – from the psychiatrist to the anonymous villains (including the aforementioned janitor) who keep contacting Ventura on the phone and even seemingly sympathetic stranger Claudine Auger – clearly craves and are not above kidnapping Ventura's wife (future director Nicole Garcia) and, ultimately, having him shot by an unseen sniper at the film's very end. Carriere's Bunuelian credentials crop up intermittently during Ventura's hallucinations at the beginning that see him walking down the corridors of the rest-home and pushing the doors open to be met inside by the hotel victim, the butterfly patient and, eventually, himself!
The film under review is a slow-burning but eminently satisfying Kafkaesque thriller with Hitchcockian overtones in which a man (Ventura) disembarks into a Spanish port and, when checking in at his usual hotel, hears some groans coming from the next apartment and gets knocked out cold for trying to be a good Samaritan. He wakes up in a strangely deserted rest home whose only inhabitants seem to be an inquisitive mousey psychiatrist, a flabby janitor and an elderly patient forever speaking to a butterfly on his shoulder which is, Harvey-like, visible only to himself. Returning once again to collect his things from the hotel, he happens to overhear a conversation between the concierge and the dead man's wife (Laura Betti) and, when he offers to help in clearing up the mystery, she is run down by a speeding car – but not before having passed on to Ventura a key to a luggage locker. The "McGuffin" in this case is a suitcase which everybody – from the psychiatrist to the anonymous villains (including the aforementioned janitor) who keep contacting Ventura on the phone and even seemingly sympathetic stranger Claudine Auger – clearly craves and are not above kidnapping Ventura's wife (future director Nicole Garcia) and, ultimately, having him shot by an unseen sniper at the film's very end. Carriere's Bunuelian credentials crop up intermittently during Ventura's hallucinations at the beginning that see him walking down the corridors of the rest-home and pushing the doors open to be met inside by the hotel victim, the butterfly patient and, eventually, himself!