Several episodes [in Les Innocents aux Mains Sales] of legal skirmishing and police detective-work are at once verbosely expository and tiresomely facetious. Chabrol's direction occasionally lapses into repetitive cross-cutting during dialogue exchanges, or alternatively into gratuitous visual and aural excess for moments of eroticism or melodrama. These flaws prevent the film from being ranked among his supreme achievements in the vein of bourgeois sexuality, emotional conflict and physical violence.

Yet Les Innocents aux Mains Sales still possesses many sequences and flashes of great skill, beauty and power: and it remains essential viewing for anybody who believes Chabrol to be one of the three best movie-makers currently working in France. Like Hitchcock in Shadow of a Doubt and Resnais in Stavisky, Chabrol in this picture expresses his subject-matter (duplicity) in a series of duplicated effects….

The resolution of Les Innocents like those of all Chabrol's better films, operates on...