The fragility of male friendship, particularly when money and women are involved, is one of many subjects explored in the great Julien Duvivier’s Chair de poule (US: Highway Pick-Up), which begins with a silent, stylish burglary and ends with a roaring conflagration over maniacal laughter. The burglars — safe crackers, to be exact — are Daniel Boisset (Robert Hossein) and Paul Genest (Jean Sorel), and when the opening heist goes wrong and Daniel ends up killing a cop, he’s forced to flee into the mountains and change his identity. When a middle-aged gas station owner named Thomas (Georges Wilson) offers him a lift, they become such fast friends that Daniel accepts Thomas’ offer of employment and housing back at the station where he soon meets the bane of his existence: Thomas’s tempestuous and much younger wife Maria (Catherine Rouvel). The ball of sin that is Maria (“It’s a real pity you’re so rotten”) soon brings about a chain of immoral events, including blackmail, double crosses, adultery, and murder. With Delerue’s laid back score (which may include too much flute for some tastes) and a constant chorus of heat bugs, the film pulses with an unguarded, sleepy rhythm that makes the senses more sensual and the shocks more shocking.