WITHOUT APPARENT MOTIVE
A.k.a. SANS MOBILE APPARENT. A deft thriller in the hard-boiled tradition of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, this story of murderous revenge opens with Michel Bardinet who plays a wealthy Frenchman who is gunned down in broad daylight. Jean-Louis Trintignant is the detective assigned to the case, and can find no motive behind the slaying. Soon Erich Segal, an astrologer, and Alexis Sellan, a roguish older man, are killed in the same mysterious way. Trintignant is convinced a link exists between the three deaths, yet he has nothing to go on. Using a tip, he recovers a theater program from a play performed some eight years earlier. The first four names on the cast list have all been victims of the mysterious sniper. Now he has the first piece of the puzzle. Adapted from the pulp novel Ten Plus One by Ed McBain, director Philippe Labro takes some interesting chances with his adaptation. Rather than use the classic darkened settings of a 1940s crime film, Labro shoots in the sun-drenched streets of the French Riviera city of Nice where he slowly builds up a feeling of impending doom, holding the mystery’s solution until the very end and maintaining a consistent mood. (1972) Widescreen, in English