Actor and director Robert Hossein played an enormous role in cementing France’s reputation for excellence in the crime genre, his talent for creating volatile characters and nihilistic atmospheres brilliantly on display in films like Blonde in a White Car (1959), The Menace (1961), and Paris Pick-Up (1962). When in the director’s chair, he became stylistically experimental, often creating what can best be called “art noir.” Such is the case with his La mort d’un tueur (US: Death of a Killer), a common noir story (home from prison to settle scores) made inventive and memorable through non-stop creative risk-taking: the protagonist has sex with his sister’s doppelganger in a castle while a woman strips to jungle music in front of a high society audience just outside; a forced, fatal game of Russian Roulette between two best friends held in the ruins of an ancient amphitheater; etc. Hossein may have taken inspiration from the surreal stylizations of Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963), the simultaneously frenetic and claustrophobic Casbah-like environs of Julien Duvivier’s Pepe le Moko (1937), and the brother-sister incestuous obsession of Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932). Hossein plays gangster Pierre Massa, just out of the pen, having been fingered by his best friend Luciano (Simón Andreu) who, Massa suspects, wanted to get rid of him so he could be with Massa’s sister Maria (Marie-France Pisier) with whom both men had a romantic obsession. Most of the film entails Massa’s efforts to track down Luciano and Maria while evading rival gangsters and, later, the police. During the copious flashbacks of the original robbery that sent Massa to prison, Hossein ingeniously suffuses each scene with a dreamy haze, a second-person voiceover narration, a total lack of dialogue, extensive overhead shots of the planning process, and a repetitive chorus, as if sung by angels, which adds psychic distance from the proceedings (the eclectic, jazz-infused musical score was composed by Hossein’s father). The use of distinct sound effects — the tick of a clock, the coos of a caged bird, the howl of dogs — deepen the ambience of otherwise silent scenes, while the camera utilizes mirror reflections, deep focus, and slow pans into extreme close-ups, among other techniques, to create a unique cinematic world.