Casting is all in the family in the deliberative and dreamy Toi… le venin (US: Blonde in a White Car): the physical resemblance between Marina Vlady and Odile Versois, sisters both in real life and on screen, comes in extremely handy for the plot as does lead actor Robert Hossein’s real-life marriage to Vlady to whom his character is romantically drawn. Hossein directs and stars as Pierre Menda, a broke drifter on the French Riviera who’s picked up one night on a country road by the mysterious, titular blonde: after making out in the car, she ejects him at gunpoint and attempts to run him over while speeding away. (We’re required to believe that Pierre never got a good look at her face in the dark.) The next day, after filing a police report, Pierre tracks the car to a lavish villa inhabited by Hélène Lecain (Versois) and her wheelchair-bound sister Eva (Vlady). After assuring Pierre that they never left home the previous night (“the ghost car” he begins to call it), the women take a liking to the handsome, aimless Pierre, who stays for dinner and ends up moving in and taking over as manager of the shop they own in town. Not surprisingly, sibling rivalry soon rears its head and Pierre gets stuck in the middle. While the script may have a few problems, director Hossein brilliantly uses the vicissitudes of a domestic love triangle to add further tension to the underlying, unsolved mystery of the ghost car, especially during nocturnal scenes when the sisters have a tendency to vanish like vampires. The score by André Hossein, the director’s father, consists primarily of bass, piano, and woodwind variations on a single theme, and Juillard’s camera uses deep focus, high angles, and unusual shadows of a tracery banister to create atmosphere in the villa, which also contains plenty of windows and doors for shot framing.