Robert Hossein is a frequent on-screen actor, active screenwriter, and director. The film in question is his creative debut in the field of production of paintings, where he did not forget to take a small role. The story turned out to be very intriguing, being like two different stories. The first is a criminal prison action movie about a pair of inmates, where one “snitch”. Both try to prove honesty in front of the other comrades in the common court, feuding with each other, but in the end forced to flee. The taste of freedom is densely saturated with gunpowder in the spirit of saturated action films with chases and fights. But the second part of the plot is much more interesting when runaways break into the beach house, killing a man, remaining with his girlfriend alone.
This is a whole psychological thriller of subtle games in “cats and mice” of the range of feelings with an inevitable fatal apogee. The beginning of the film is not necessary. There is a good action for its years, sketches of the harsh laws of the male team, sullen scenery and, of course, an introductory part with a couple of characters, exposing them as strong guys ready to kill for the sake of achieving the goal. The first half seems to have been created only as a preparatory foundation for a mesmerizing plot twist, pushing our “heroes” from the big road with a young fragile special, performed by a young Marina Vlady, whose beauty smashes windows to pieces at the first moment of appearance in the frame. The symbiosis of a complex confrontation is slowly dissected by the author, who builds a deadly conflict between physically strong men who know how to kill without conscience, and female revenge, whose superiority is calculated cold-blooded deceit and natural charms. The director writes a vicious triangle, then as if transferring it to another planet from the boundless horizon, sand under his feet and the sea, so that nothing prevents the intriguing battle of minds, feelings, ambitions, instincts. The tension is heating up to the limit, because it seems that negative characters begin to deserve the audience sympathy because of the expectation of the final immersion in the quicksand of female revenge, which is also quite understandable and approving for the justice of punishment to criminals. Antagonists become stupid victims, succumbed to passion, and the protagonist resembles a devil with an angelic face, which is already - indicative in one of the talking turning scenes - it is not enough just to hand over enemies to the authorities, but to become their self-made executioner, revelling in the spectacle.
But it is unnecessary to think that the tape at least resembles an operational direction, which flooded cinemas with gaggy simple stories in the 70s about vengeful beauties with weapons at the top, with unjustifiably grotesque feminist images. Not at all, and this is the great merit of the film, it seized the subtle feminine principle in the character, carrying it in every action and deed, bringing it to the very final curtain. We are men, fire going ahead, using all its power, and women, water flowing around inconvenient obstacles and smoothly sharpening the hardest stones. Therefore, even after receiving a revolver, the heroine plausibly lowers it, rejecting this metal toy of death created by a man, preferring her female weapon, which is no sweeter than a bullet. And how can you break away from the screen, if the author accurately grasped the female psychology in detail, pushing it against the male one, identifying only one winner without any draw?
As a result, a very interesting thriller turned out, which can only be blamed for the lack of blackness in what is happening, because in life, unfortunately, criminals and murderers with bouts of nobility are rare. But this does not interfere with the general assessment of the film - almost an experiment on the survival of the trinity dangerous to each other, under the influence of mutual magnetism.
8 out of 10