Four Bodings

Crime Does Not Pay is a film-within-a-film excursion into crime passionnel that pays off almost too generously with blood, plot and stars. After the 16th reel, so does the mind.

Three of the four episodes comprise a movie that a Parisian goes to see one afternoon after a spat with his wife. The first is a grisly little playlet borrowed from Stendhal's Italian Chronicles, about an aging Venetian duchess who gets even with her handsome, young, philandering lover by having him chased by a band of cutthroats. He finds momentary sanctuary in a church where a funeral is in progress. But when he discovers the funeral is for him (a grim whimsy of the duchess'), he runs out and is run through by the bully boys. The duchess' crime does not pay: her rival sneaks into her boudoir and sprinkles her beauty mask with some awful acid. The segment ends with the loudest shrieks since Fay Wray met King Kong.

In Part II Michele Morgan is valiant and pure as a woman who has been falsely accused of adultery by her husband's political enemies. Told partly through Daumier-like drawings, partly through live action (mostly the narrowing of Mlle. Morgan's elegant nostrils), it takes place in France of 1885 and culminates in a noisy courtroom acquittal. Moral: it doesn't pay to underestimate the power of a nostril.

The third filmlet concerns one Gabrielle Fenayrou, who, while never bloodying her pretty hands, was the muse for two murderers. Gabrielle lives with a gouty old husband and keeps a handsome young lover. One afternoon while tangoing (the year is 1913), he tells her he is betrothed to another--but, with true Gallic practicality, assures her that this need not interrupt their dalliance for a moment. Gabrielle, combining sang-froid with S. Freud, goes along with this, and together they plot to kill her husband. But the lover's pistol only clicks, and the husband shoots him instead. Gabrielle's duplicity soon turns into triplicity, and before the episode ends, she has two more victims. Three, if one counts Gabrielle herself.

The fourth and final installment involves the Parisian moviegoer who has been watching all this happen on the screen from a balcony seat. He, too, has a murder up his sleeve, and trapped in his clever--and stupefyingly complicated --design are a British army officer (Richard Todd), whose stiff upper lip extends right on up to the top of his head, and the moviegoer's wife, the still beautiful Danielle Darrieux. There is some business about whisky, ice trays and special-delivery letters and the services of la Surete would be needed to get it all straight. Certainly the subtitles are of little help.

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