The premise of Innocents with Dirty Hands comes straight out of The Postman Always Rings Twice: an attractive woman married to an older, impotent man meets a handsome young man. But once the femme fatale and her lover have marked the husband for murder, Chabrol’s film (set in glamorous St. Tropez) shifts from film noir to suspense thriller with the disappearance of her accomplice giving the widow more questions than answers. Although Chabrol was often accused of a noticeable reticence towards sex in the early stages of his career, the sexual frankness of this film continues the emergence of the erotic that began the previous year with Pleasure Party and would continue through subsequent films. – HG