Summary
In a moment of madness, Grégoire Duval, a respectable pharmacist, kills a young
woman who is sun-bathing by a lake. Unable to take in what he has done, Duval flees
from the scene of the crime and behaves as if nothing has happened. The murder is
blamed on the young woman’s lover, Sautral, who has been arrested and is soon to
be tried before a court of law. Learning that he has been appointed a juror
at Sautral’s trial, Duval is driven by his conscious to save the innocent man. Unfortunately,
the town has already made up its mind who the murderer is and it seems that nothing Duval
can do will change the outcome...
Review
Le Septième juré manages to be both a masterpiece of the suspense
thriller genre and a cleverly written satire on the corrupt bourgeois elite in France.
It is by far the best film to have been made by Georges Lautner, who is perhaps better
known for his comic thriller parodies, such as Les
Tontons flinguers, and run-of-the-mill policiers of the Flic
ou voyou variety. For perhaps the only time in his film-making career, Lautner
shows a rare brilliance which momentarily puts him on the same level as the directors
of the best crime thrillers of the 1950s, including the great Henri-Georges Clouzot.
What makes this a particularly compelling film is the quality and originality of the cinematography,
which is strangely evocative of film noir and New Wave cinema at the same time, combining
threatening shadowy images with unsettling artificial lighting. The opening scene
of the film is particularly effective, surpassing Hitchcock in its suspense-laden brilliance
and harrowing abruptness.
Bernard Blier is no less impressive in one of his best film roles. His performance
is nothing less than a tour de force in which the actor stuns the audience with an astonishingly
effective display of compassion and humanity, and this after his character commits a shockingly
brutal killing which he then callously blames on his frigid wife. It is a pity that
such a great acting talent should have spent so much of his career in the shadows of stars
such as Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura.
© James Travers 2001
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