Aside from Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and Clouzot's "Diaboliques" which are still unsurpassed,the best adaptation of a Boileau-Narcejac novel for the screen.Whereas the two masters completely rewrote the stories,the screenplay of " les Louves" was reworked by the novelists themselves .
This is an absorbing suspense from the railroad tracks at dawn where you've got to watch out for trains going nowhere to that house in the country where the hero feels that he is fading little by little .
Two prisoners of war escape from a camp.One of them has a soldier wartime woman pen friend he wants to marry ,a person he never met.But he dies and his pal takes his name (impostors have always played a prominent part in thrillers:to name but two ,both William Irish ("I married a dead man" ) and Patricia Highsmith( "The talented mister Ripley" )brilliantly succeeded ).When he arrives in the "Marraine de Guerre" 's home,the plot thickens.It seems that the woman's sister knows more than she should.And his own "sister" Julia is coming any day know.How will he be able to go on lying and pretending he is someone he is not? Luis Salvsky has a dream of a cast ,his four leads being part of the creme de la creme of French actors:François Perier as the unfortunate victim who will discover that there's much more worse than a prisoners camp;Micheline Presles as his pen friend,prepossessing,but isn't it strange that a woman takes a man she's never met before to be her husband?Jeanne Moreau as Presles's sister,a sensual woman,who enjoys séances in the dark where she reveals things better left unsaid;and to top it all,Madeleine Robinson ,as the dead soldier's sister ,who welcomes the impostor as "her dear little Bernard" .
This fabulous quartet takes the film out on a level of stratospheric intensity.Often filmed in close shots,their faces are like disturbing masks.Their eyes are always telling lies and the viewer,caught with them in a devilish trap,needs a breath of fresh air after the last sequence,to be avoided by people suffering from claustrophobia.
This is another fine French film noir of the fifties,when the genre was thriving before the new wavelet butchered it.
