The cat and mouse machinations among the characters in Le dos au mur (US: Back to the Wall) at one point almost veer into black comedy before director Édouard Molinaro pulls us back into the bitter noir universe he’s created around an extramarital affair. Opening with an extended sequence of shadows and silence in which a man removes a corpse from an apartment, transports it across town, mixes a vat of concrete, and buries the corpse inside, the film grips the viewer for the full 93 minutes. In flashback, we soon learn that this man is wealthy industrialist Jacques Decry (Gérard Oury) who has recently discovered an affair between his wife Gloria (Jeanne Moreau) and her former classmate from drama school named Yves Normand (Philippe Nicaud). Instead of immediately putting an end to it, Decry, who still loves Gloria, exacts revenge through a clever ploy involving a false identity, a private detective, blackmail, payoffs, and suicide. The performances are excellent all around, but Claire Maurier deserves special notice for her subtle, earthy portrayal of bar manager Ghislaine whose motivations are never entirely clear. Visually extravagant, the film contains too many beautiful set-ups to count, Molinaro and crew utilizing unusual camera angles (from above, from the floor), blankets of shadows, lamplit streets, and iron gates, even Venetian blind lighting on ceilings, to establish a constrictive world of distrust. Note the anxious scene in which the Decrys are watching television together, their elaborate mansion reduced down to what appears to be a wallpapered cave.