Le Boucher
Claude Chabrol was in his prime when he made this suspense thriller in the Hitchcock mode of menace and uncertainty.
It has everything we associate with this master of French cinema, a man whose career has lasted better than most of his much more frontier-busting contemporaries.
Set in provincial France - Chabrol's beloved stamping ground - it stars his then wife and frequent collaborator Stéphane Audran as a schoolteacher who forms a liaison with the local butcher, a man played by Jean Yanne with unsettling subtlety of manner quite apart from the skills of his trade.
Unexplained murders are occurring in the neighbourhood. But surely the butcher is too obvious a suspect to be the real killer?
Chabrol holds the question in beautiful suspense while revealing the underside of rural life in all its maggoty detail.
Some good meals, though, are eaten by all concerned.
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