The Bride Wore Black

Description
An engrossing, enigmatic tale of passion and revenge, this 1969 Golden GlobeÂ(r) nominee* from François Truffaut and co-writer Jean Louis Richard is “cool, witty and disturbingly heartless” (Saturday Review). The bewitching Jeanne Moreau is “simultaneously stunning, chilling and altogether remarkable” (Boxoffice) as a woman who will stop at nothing to avenge her husband’s death! Julie (Moreau), a beautiful young bride, has just married her childhood sweatheart and love of her life. But just moments after the ceremony, her beloved is murdered on the steps of thechurch. Emotionally distraught, Julie becomes obsessed with her bridegroom’s death and begins a descent into madness as she relentlessly pursues the men responsible. One by one, Julie sees to their demise, and, with each murder more bone chilling and diabolically clever than the last, the question is not who will be next–but rather how they will meet their ghastly end. *Foreign Language FilmAmazon.com essential video
François Truffaut’s 1968 thriller was an attempt to reconcile the exclusive experience of the Hitchcockian hero with the expansiveness of Jean Renoir’s view of flawed humanity. Jeanne Moreau stars as a newlywed whose husband is shot dead on the church steps following their wedding. The story then follows her systematic and relentless efforts to track down the men who were involved in the killing, murdering each one with a creative efficiency that Truffaut does not mean for us to take too seriously. The film’s real point is the interesting tension between the audience’s growing knowledge about and sympathy toward the guilty fellows, who really are rather ordinary people, and the narrative hook concerning the heroine’s reinvention into a figure of insulated emotion and revenge. (Moreau’s character resembles nothing so much as the pathological but vulnerable title character of Hitchcock’s Marnie.) The Bride Wore Black (based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich) is not meant to be taken as an object lesson in irony, however. In the finest and most entertaining tradition of Hollywood movies (certainly most of Hitchcock’s movies), one can watch Truffaut’s film without giving a thought to anything other than its own smooth movement. Take a step back, however, and there are riches to be explored. –Tom Keogh
The Bride Wore Black