If the cinema of Claude Chabrol is anything, it is glib. What could be more glib than that scene in The Third Lover [L'Oeil du Malin] in which the betrayed husband examines some photographs serving as evidence of his wife's infidelity. The shots constitute a gradual progression from indifferent medium shot, the subject squarely and objectively centered within the frame, to oppressively intimate close-up. This is disarmingly glib….

The flexible, functional beauty of this example is modestly intellectual as well as frankly sensational in its appeal. Here is the cinema of basic literacy; Chabrol employs an articulate and correct grammar of film-making. Such exactness of intention and effect immediately recalls Hitchcock, whose name, along with that of Minnelli, invariably arises in a discussion of Chabrol.

Minnelli's influence is most apparent when Chabrol is working in color and "in period," responding to both as he does with a marked...