A Spanish-French production set in an unspecified Latin American country, Jesús Franco’s Rififi de la ciudad (US: Rififi in the City) is a late-in-the-cycle nightclub noir with elements of Italian giallo and an unexpectedly high body count. Police detective Miguel Mora (Fernando Fernán Gómez) receives a call from an informer about corruption involving a top senatorial candidate named Maurice Leprince (Jean Servais, who starred in Jules Dassin’s 1955 Rififi from which this film borrows its name), but hours later the informer’s dead body is thrown through Mora’s front window; this sets the detective off on an investigation of Leprince’s shady nightclub and business dealings, which will include a brutal gang beating that leaves him for dead in the ocean. Mora hunts for a smoking gun as Leprince’s thugs are stabbed to death, one after another, by a killer on the loose. Franco’s craftsmanship is outstanding (even the musical numbers are inventively shot, the chanteuse often singing directly to the camera), the atmospherics are cranked up in all the right places, and the violence is unsparing (a scene when a murder victim attempts to block a bullet with her hand is eerily effective). Suspense crackles scene after scene: the key to a safe is stolen from a sleeping man’s jacket; a victim is trapped in a dark train car with a breathing, invisible, knife-wielding killer; Mora is chased and surrounded by thugs in the night club basement as festive music pounds from above. White’s guitar-centered score provides a Sergio Leone feel contrasted by Pacheco’s roving, occasionally disorienting camera (note the foreboding shadow of “NO” on the informer’s face when he agrees to meet Mora). Director Franco went on to perform in front of the camera in the following year’s Strange Voyage (1964).