It’s a popular and reliable noir premise: a handsome drifter arrives in town and finds himself cohabiting with a beautiful woman and her male chaperone whose life suddenly becomes expendable. Among the many variations on the theme are The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Highway Pickup (1963), Siberian Lady Macbeth (1962), and this one, Charles Brabant’s stealthy Le piège (US: No Escape). The premise may be unoriginal, but Brabant adds a few twists like replacing the traditional cuckolded husband with a lustful father-in-law and setting the story next door to an oil refinery that produces a constant industrial roar like a dragon roaming the premises. Raf Vallone plays Gino Carsone, an Italian fugitive, and Magali Noël plays innkeeper Cora Caillé, who offers him shelter and sex; the chemistry between the two leads is heated, palpable, and very believable (Cora’s initial, wordless flirting with Gino by sucking a straw and making little girl eyes is practically obscene on its own.) Charles Vanel shines as the pathetic, old Caillé, reduced to peeping and preying on his dead son’s wife. Shadows follow the characters wherever they go, and cinematographer Séchan achieves several triumphs of mise-en-scène: notice, for example, how the distant refinery smokestack through Cora’s bedroom window looks like a romantic candle burning in the dark.