Not even bad in a good way

A Masterpiece!

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

After watching auteur film maker François Truffaut's Film Noir Shoot the Pianist I decided to take a look at his IMDb page,where I spotted a revenge psychological Film Noir Thriller which appears to have "inspired" a number of recent movies.With Truffaut being a pretty big name,I was surprised that the only DVD (with English Subtitles) out was a French import edition,which led to me getting ready to lift the veil of the bride.The plot:Attempting suicide by diving out of a window, Julie Kohler is stopped by her mum.Gathering her composure,Kohler gathers a notebook with five names and 5 piles of cash.Packing everything up,Kohler tells her mum that she is going on a long holiday.Visiting a luxury apartment block,Kohler gets the person at the front desk to reveal when and where a man called Bliss is having his stag party.Greeting all the guests at his stag party,Bliss finds his eyes being drawn to a mysterious women.Unable to take his mind off the women, (who none of the guests recognise) Bliss decides to go up and talk to her.Introduceing herself,Kohler gets Bliss to join her on the balcony,so that they can speak privately.Whilst Bliss says that he has never seen her before,Kohler puts her scarf round a tree in front of the balcony,and tells Bliss to climb over and get it.As Bliss climbs over the balcony,Kohler reveals that they actually met 5 years ago at her wedding,and pushes Bliss to his death. Leaving Bliss's dying stag party behind,Kohler sets her sights on giving four other men a late wedding present from a dressed in black bride.View on the film:Married to a "troubled" legacy, (from Truffaut & cinematographer Raoul Coutard having vicious arguments over the style of the movie for the whole production,which led to lead Jeanne Moreau having to direct the rest of the cast,to Trauffaut to later calling the title "A disappointment"!) Truffaut is still able to serve up a smoking hot dish of revenge.Whilst not featuring as much social commentary as his "French New Wave" work, Truffaut & Jean-Louis Richard's adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's novel does slyly make each of the 5 guys on Kohler's death wish list be rooted in cosy upper/middle- class lifestyles,with the "tidy" image that they all offer allowing each of them to cover their deadly pasts.Taking an episodic approach to Kohler's revenge,the writers brilliantly take their time in allowing Kohler's attacks to become increasingly harsh,with Kohler's initial playfulness being burnt away to reveal a merciless femme fatale.Spending time with each of the 5, Truffaut and Richard give each segment its own unique Neo- Noir edge,from Delvaux's grubby car dealing,to Morane's upstanding family life bubbling away into darkness.Keeping away from unwrapping all of Kohler's mysterious past,the writers delicately open up brief glimpses into Kohler's past,which give the title a tense mood,as the flashbacks become threaded in Kohler's search for revenge.Despite his comments later about the movie,director François Truffaut and cinematographer Raoul Coutard give the title a ravishingly ultra- stylised Film Noir blushing bride.Backed by a superb score by Bernard Herrmann which transforms wedding bells into a doom-laden anthem, Truffaut nods to "The master of suspense" with charismatic enthusiasm, as Truffaut follows Kohler's revenge attacks with dazzling tracking shots which follow Kohler setting her plans,to tense,tightly held shots sinking one of the guys into the permanent darkness that he helped to push Kohler into.Giving the revenge Film Noir a touch of dour Gothic with Kohler's alluring black and white dresses, Truffaut spreads rich frosty reds across the title,which wonderfully peel open Kohler's (mostly) cold emotions for her victims.Given the challenge of directing the rest of the cast during production,the beautiful Jeanne Moreau gives an excellent performance as Kohler.Showing pure joy in the flashback,Moreau makes sure that the ghost of the joy always stays at the front of the title,as Kohler glides into Film Noir hell.Spending lots of time with each victim before they meet their end,Moreau strikes a perfect balance in pulling Kohler's tormented nerves across the screen,whist keeping a sense of mysterious,icy femme fatale deeply linked to Kohler,as the bride walks out in black.

To really take in this film, you have to watch it consciously disassociating yourself from the legend of genius that is the legacy of Francois Truffaut. So this is Truffaut's homage to Hitchcock?! This is a script a boyish, 12 year old Hitch might have written, read the finished product through once, and thrown it giggling into the wastebasket. The Bernard Hermann score seems a melodramatic intrusion, musical phrases and tonal pastiche; something that Hermann pulled from a grab bag of discarded "mood" compositions. Hitchcock females played detached, cool blooded seductresses. Here Truffaut has deformed this template presenting Jeanne Moreau as a wooden female mannequin exclusively captivating men simply through displaying her couture wardrobe and coiffed hair. Hitchcock's women were aloof allures, but each invariably had vulnerabilities threatening to surface. We see no cracks like this in Moreau's character; she's a stylish popsicle. All this doesn't speak well for the male sex, each of whom immediately fall for her like dumb animals aroused by the scent of a woman; close proximity is an open call to an entanglement of bodies in heat. This simplistic stereotype of male and female is not wholly incongruous with the ambiguous, improbable plot line. Julie Kohler, the bride, while not left at the alter, is left a widow minutes after the ceremony, her new husband falling dead on the church steps, killed by a shot gun blast from out of nowhere. Her devastation is total. Dissuaded from suicide by her mother, she plots a vendetta against those responsible for the killing. Whether… or even how… she learns of the circumstances behind her husband's death, or discovers the identities of the five men responsible…is never explained. She goes about her business of being a femme fatale killing machine programmed for revenge. This is a silly, self-indulgent offering from that most self-indulgent of French New Wave film directors, Francois Truffaut.

A mysterious woman (Jeanne Moreau) is going around France killing men...but only certain men. She blames them for the death of husband and wants to make them pay.This is based on an excellent novel by Cornell Woolrich. The novel is quick, exciting and always keeps you guessing. Sadly this movie does none of that. Truffaut is obviously trying to imitate Hitchcock here. He uses the kind of story Hitchcock would use and even uses Bernard Hermann (who composed most of Hitch's films) as a composer. As a result it SOUNDS like a Hitchcock film but it certainly doesn't play like one. The story is slow with endless dialogue passages. The plot moves in jerks--not smoothly. Moreau--a beautiful and wonderful actress--looks horrible here and gives a rare bad performance. In fact EVERYONE looks ugly and there are ill-conceived changes made from the story (although I realize some were needed). I was basically bored but the score kept me watching. Slow and uninvolving--a real disappointment.

The Bride Wore Black (1968) is noted as being director François Truffaut's gleeful homage/pastiche of the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, with the usual characteristics of deception and retribution, cool cinematography and a lush score by none other than Bernard Hermann all being co-opted alongside some nicely subtle allusions to the broader aspects of the thriller and mystery genres. Whereas it would have been fairly easy for the filmmaker to produce a work that was a shot-for-shot recreation of something that Hitchcock might have done - like for example with De Palma or Van Sant - Truffaut takes the familiar style and iconography of Hitchcock's work - in particular from films like Strangers on a Train (1951), To Catch a Thief (1955) and most prominently Marnie (1964) - and fashions a film that is, on the one hand, an affectionate ode to the filmmaker and, on the other hand, a cruel lampoon. In doing so, the director is able to produce a film that is not only interesting in terms of story and character, but often very funny too.I was genuinely quite surprised by the use of humour here. I expected from the plot-outline that the film would be incredibly dour and austere but that really isn't the case; with the mixture of lurid, almost B-movie style subject matter, revenge and farce managing to come together fairly well for the most part, as Truffaut tinkers with the expected codes and conventions of the thriller genre in much the same way that Antonioni did with the much superior masterpiece Blowup (1966). Like Blowup, the film can be seen as something of an "anti-thriller", or a film that sets up a number of potentially electrifying Hitchcockian like set pieces and then continually thwarts them - or indeed, forgets about them completely - as the mechanics of the plot push us further and further away from the more recognisable aspects of the story at hand. Whenever we imagine that a scene will play out to our usual expectations, with Hermann's orchestrations and the inventive camera work of Godard's regular cinematographer Raoul Coutard setting the scene, something else happens that throws the film completely off course. For example, in one particular scene, in which our central character stalks one of her victims through the junkyard where he works, we get Truffaut setting up a series of shots that continually teases us with the slow-build of the sequence, the cut-away to the gun and the impending moment before the expected gunshot and then - unexpectedly - the police arrive and arrest the man before any retribution can be taken.This idea of setting up something potentially very thrilling and exciting, only to then subvert it by way of knowing farce and arch genre references is used throughout The Bride Wore Black, creating an odd juxtaposition between light comedy and cold-blooded murder that probably won't be to all tastes. Apparently the critics of the time hated it, and indeed, Truffaut himself would denounce the film as one of his worst just a few years later, perhaps as a reaction to the knowing tone and the flippant games being played with the more recognisable cinematic conventions. Obviously, Truffaut was a huge fan of Hitchcock, and indeed, one of the first critics to really look at his films within a serious historical context, but all the same, the satirical sideswipes at Hitchcock's work and the evidence of homage is often quite cutting and not always as complimentary as we might expect. The final shot for example, which is indeed very clever and filled with ideas of visual wit, is at the same time blunt to the point of almost going out of its way to lampoon the ending of some of Hitchcock's earlier films like Saboteur (1942). Then we have the ultimate revelation of the event that drove the character to seek revenge and the almost broadly comical rendering of the scene and the complete disregard for any kind of logic and reason.Was the reason that Truffaut denounced the film simply because he felt it was uncomplimentary, almost mocking of Hitchcock's work, or did he simply feel that the games within the narrative and the combination of murder and farce were simply unsuccessful on this particular project? Regardless, the film succeeds on an entirely perverse level, as we watch Jeanne Moreau step into the role of the iconic "Hitchcock blonde" and plot bloody revenge on those that have wronged her. Some have drawn comparisons with Tarantino's epic Kill Bill (2003-2004), which are apt given the basic outline of the plot and certain elements of the iconography, though Tarantino claims to be unfamiliar with the film in question. Although the broader ramifications of the narrative remain vague and enigmatic even through to the end, the fun of The Bride Wore Black is not in its characters or storytelling capabilities, but in the gleeful subversion of the iconography of the Hollywood thriller by way of the Nouvelle Vague and of course, those constant allusions to Hitchcock and his work.