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Location: Seattle, Washington, United States

What you have here is an old guy. In education for 30 years, started teaching elementary, ended as library and media director of community college. I've enjoyed mountain climbing, sports car rallying, was pipe major of a bagpipe band, played guitar and sang during the folk revival, walking and hiking later in life. Now fairly sedentary. Enjoy reading, esp. mysteries and fantasy, but my reading is pretty eclectic. Enjoy movies, giving Netflix a workout.

Monday, April 02, 2007

Rider on the Rain

I watched the movie, Rider on the Rain last evening. It was a French film made in 1960 and starred Charles Bronson and Marlene Jobert with Jill Ireland, Bronson’s wife, in a major supporting role. Marlene Jobert is followed and raped while her husband is absent. Later she discovers the rapist still lurking in the basement of her home. She kills him with two blasts from a shotgun. Soon Bronson shows up, hinting that he knows she murdered a man. He says he is not the police and it quite a long time into the movie before we find out who he really is. He hounds her constantly and she begins by denying the murder and consistently denies to the very end. The film has quite a few twists and turns and almost a satisfying ending. At least for me.

I can barely remember 1960. It must have been a good time because the skirts were short. Marlene Jobert wears hers jauntily, as does Jill Ireland, playing her mother. Jobert is not beautiful, but rather cute in her short haircut and wearing her all white clothes well. She has a wonderful figure to carry it off with elan.

The story is from Sebastien Japrisot, a French mystery novelist, not very well known in this country. A few years back the film A Very Long Engagement was made from one of his novels.
This is an offbeat film which I enjoyed very much. There was some discussion of the film on Imdb and I gather that the original DVD was pretty bad and had some scenes cut from it. I commend it to those who are looking for an offbeat mystery. I should warn you that the music track has a warble and is a bit distracting, but the dialogue is just fine.

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

I remember seeing and enjoying this movie on its first U.S. run, which must have been a few years after it was filmed.

5:16 AM  

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