Review of Symphonie pour un massacre

Symphony for a massacre, as the French wording has it, never particularly rises above the contract of its title. Neither does it, via the medium of the crime thriller deliver any poignant commentary on life, as you might get from Melville in Le deuxième souffle (referring to a second wind you may get in later life), or via the medium of a "buddies movie" deliver any poignant commentary on male solidarity, as you might get from Duvivier in La Belle Equipe. It is a film where people are simply killed sequentially, but without the panache that grand guignol would rely upon to float the same property. It suffers perhaps from being quite late in the day, in 1963, for creating such a work of noir, too far from the pessimistic thoughts and hardships arising from the Second World War.

Of course there are master actors and actresses involved in the movie and three master directors, so it is not reasonable for me to suggest it is a turkey, but I have seen better films of its type, at least to my taste. There are occasional flourishes in the dialogue, Charles Vanel's Paoli darkly offering some "paté de merles" or "paté of blackbirds" to his co-conspirator, but it does feel like a Michel Audiard could have been bought in to tighten things up.

The film attempts to make an impact through the use of symphonic music in fairly uneventful scenes, and this element did not work for me. Much better the minimalism of Le Samouraï.