“You’ll never be happy without me,” says Clara Saccard (Yvonne Furneaux) to her husband Walter (Maurice Ronet) right before she’s found dead at the bottom of a cliff in Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Meurtrier (US: Enough Rope). We don’t know whether or not Walter had something to do with Clara’s death — and neither does police investigator Corby (Robert Hossein) — but we do know he was keenly interested in a recent case where the wife of bookstore owner Melchior Kimmel (Gert Fröbe) was found murdered, so interested in fact that he had been paying curious visits to Kimmel despite the bookseller’s having been cleared of any charges. (The disorienting opening sequence where we watch Kimmel brutally stab his screaming wife while the roar of a passing train competes with René Cloërec’s blaring orchestral score is reminiscent of a similarly staged murder scene in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers three years earlier.) Heavy on noir compositions and based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, the author behind Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Autant-Lara’s underappreciated film features a dynamite, great-looking cast and a nicely done script that makes the most of Highsmith’s intricate plot, in which Saccard’s careless oversights and blunders keep piling up until his arrest and conviction seem inevitable. Fröbe is typically brilliant as a psychotic ogre of a man whose near blindness still manages to elicit a few grains of sympathy, but Hossein may be the highlight, his cop’s gleeful use of force against Kimmel almost comical at times, smashing his glasses, punching him in the gut, chucking a shoe at his head, always followed by a satisfied grin.