Two years before Breathless, before Godard was talking about needing a girl and a gun, 26-year-old Louis Malle unveiled this brash debut: a brilliant, preposterous slice of noir-suspense realism and Highsmithian mistaken identity, imbued with the poetry of romantic despair, mostly voiced directly into the camera by Jeanne Moreau – a captivating kind of choric-fatale, with dark sensuous shadows under the eyes. She is a wealthy married woman, Mme Florence Cabala, who in this era when capital punishment (the "scaffold") was very much on France's statute book, hatches the imperfect crime with her lover, ex‑paratrooper Julien (Maurice Ronet). Chaotically, their paths cross with gamine florist's assistant, Véronique (Yori Bertin), and her teen boyfriend, Louis (Georges Poujouly). They are the younger generation, contemptuous of their elders' imperial adventures and behaviour during the Occupation, but apparently just as cynical and greedy. It ends in violence and with a cop on their trail: Cherrier, played by Lino Ventura (seen in Claude Sautet's recently revived 60s thriller Classe Tous Risques). It is not free of plot-holes – audiences are entitled to ask how a certain grappling-hook could become detached from a rail and fall to the pavement – but what a supremely stylish and watchable picture it is. Visiting the crime scene, the investigating prosecutor (Hubert Deschamps) drolly calls it a classical tragedy, and it does observe the Aristotelian unity of time, unfolding over 24 hours.