Claude Chabrol is assured of a place in any study of the new French cinema, for he was the first of the Cahiers group to make a feature film and as a producer gave Godard, Rivette and Rohmer valuable assistance on their first efforts, but there is less certainty as to the actual merits of his work as a director.

Until his recent spy films Chabrol had concerned himself principally with personal relationships. His early films depict the close, almost homosexual, relationship of two young men, and a constant theme is the precariousness of love, which, indeed, is treated as almost purely illusory in several works: L'Oeil du Malin, where the apparently successful marriage is undermined by a tissue of lies, and Landru, the hero of which makes his living by robbing and killing gullible women who believe his flattering words of love. Chabrol's attitude to his characters...