Leda
From the Chicago Reader (August 1, 1999). — J.R.
Claude Chabrol’s first color feature (1959), also known as À double tour and Web of Passion, adapts a Stanley Ellin thriller in which a bourgeois family’s oedipal conflicts lead to murder. The beautiful color cinematography of Aix-en-Provence is by Henri Decae, and the film is plotted with a mise en scène that suggests Alfred Hitchcock. The lively if uneven cast includes Jean-Paul Belmondo, the creepy André Jocelyn, Madeleine Robinson, Bernadette Lafont, and nouvelle vague axiom Laszlo Szabo. It’s not a total success, but it was one of the first pictures to translate the French New Wave’s genre interests into mainstream terms, and it’s full of sexy and irreverent (as well as brightly irrelevant) details. (JR)
