The brilliant opening sequence of Georges Franju’s Pleins feux sur l’assassin (US: Spotlight on a Murderer), the follow-up to his masterpiece, Eyes Without a Face (1960), follows the final minutes of Count Hervé de Kéraudren’s (Pierre Brasseur) life as the dying aristocrat, dressed in his Knights of Malta robe and surrounded by his vast Medieval estate with its fairy tale towers, seals himself inside a secret passage of the chateau and synchronizes his final breath with the wind-up doll that will rest eternally on his lap. Sharing a premise with Julien Duvivier’s The Burning Court from the following year, the film’s main drama begins when the count’s seven heirs arrive at the chateau (castle, really) to claim their prizes, but learn that French inheritance law requires a waiting period of five years if the corpse is never found (“Medically, he’s dead; legally, he’s missing”). While they search everywhere for Kéraudren’s body, they also devise a plan for raising the income required simply to maintain the estate: they’ll wire the entire place with loudspeakers and spotlights in order to give paid tours to the public and offer son et lumière shows of Medieval legends to local dignitaries. The estate itself appears to resist this commercialization, however, as the installation of this new equipment leads to the deaths, one by one, of the heirs. In the end, of course, one heir will be exposed as responsible for the carnage, having hoped to abrogate the entire fortune for him/herself. The cast is outstanding, ostensibly led by Jean-Louis Trintignant as Jean-Marie, who puts up his girlfriend Micheline (Dany Saval, who would later marry Maurice Jarre, composer of the score) in the nearby village while he attends to the family business (the scene in which Jean-Marie sneaks her into the tower at night is as tense as it is breathtaking). Other suspects include Claude (Georges Rollin), Jeanne (Pascale Audret), Henri (Gérard Buhr), and even exasperated housekeeper Marthe (Maryse Martin), who readily informs the family that the count resented them all. Also on hand is Philippe Leroy, a prolific French actor who had made his film debut just months earlier in Jacques Becker’s Le Trou (1960).