The Bride Wore Black

Truffaut adapted Cornell Woolrich — the pulp novelist behind Rear Window — hired Bernard Herrmann to write the score, and put Jeanne Moreau at the centre of it. The result is his most openly Hitchcockian film, made in the year he published the interview book, and it has always sat slightly awkwardly in his filmography for exactly that reason.

Julie Kohler's husband is shot on the church steps as they leave the ceremony. She sets out after the five men responsible, presenting herself to each in a different guise — a stranger at a party, a schoolteacher, an artist's model — and the film gives us her method before it gives us her motive. Moreau plays her as almost affectless, a woman who has emptied herself out for the duration, and Raoul Coutard shoots her in a repeated white-and-black colour scheme that becomes the film's organising motif. Michel Bouquet, Jean-Claude Brialy and Charles Denner take the victims.

Truffaut later said he had made it too coldly, and French critics agreed at the time; Herrmann's score, one of his last great ones, was largely praised. Its afterlife has been considerable — Tarantino has cited it repeatedly as a source for Kill Bill, and the structure of a woman working through a list has become a genre of its own. As a piece of pure construction it is more elegant than its reputation allows.