Amazon.com Essentials:
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
