The last of Chabrol's films from the early Seventies to straggle into this country, Docteur Popaul arrives with a dauntingly unprepossessing reputation as a coarse misogynist jest. Coarse it certainly is, with its abrupt fluctuations between love triangle melodrama, soft-core sex farce and slapstick self-parody—and with a hero whose moral development seems to be from heartless cad to bewildered buffoon….

The exact nature of the Chabrolian spoof, however, is rather easier to identify from the perspective of La Décade Prodigieuse and Innocents aux Mains Sales than it would have been in the context of Le Boucher and Juste avant la Nuit; its strategies roughly adumbrate the later films (particularly Innocents), removing moral complexities from bourgeois revenge-and-guilt plots … and trying them out for size on characters who will either distend and toy with them with Wellesian presumption or kick them about with the raffish conceit of a...