The Bride Wore Black by Cornell Woolrich

I was genuinely quite surprised by the use of humour here.

In doing so, the director is able to produce a film that is not only interesting in terms of story and character, but often very funny too. Whereas it would have been fairly easy for the filmmaker to produce a work that was a shot-for-shot recreation of something that Hitchcock might have done - like for example with De Palma or Van Sant - Truffaut takes the familiar style and iconography of Hitchcock's work - in particular from films like Strangers on a Train (1951), To Catch a Thief (1955) and most prominently Marnie (1964) - and fashions a film that is, on the one hand, an affectionate ode to the filmmaker and, on the other hand, a cruel lampoon. It was filmed by Francois Truffaut under the same title, and went on to inspire Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.The Bride Wore Black (1968) is noted as being director François Truffaut's gleeful homage/pastiche of the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, with the usual characteristics of deception and retribution, cool cinematography and a lush score by none other than Bernard Hermann all being co-opted alongside some nicely subtle allusions to the broader aspects of the thriller and mystery genres. But one police detective is convinced that the answers to these questions can save the lives of men who might be next on the list, men who will continue to die at a rapid rate unless he can solve the puzzle and intervene.Ĭornell Woolrich’s first crime novel, The Bride Wore Black is the stylish, tense thriller that launched the career of “the supreme master of suspense” (New York Times). Nor do they know why anyone would be targeting this series of seemingly-unrelated persons.

Nobody knows her identity, where she comes from or whither she goes. No connection, that is, aside from the appearance of a beautiful woman in each case, just before the victims met their untimely ends.

There was nothing to connect it with the poisoning of a lonely man in his squalid apartment, or with the married business-man killed after him, sealed into a closet and left to suffocate. When the wealthy ladies’ man fell from his balcony in the midst of his engagement party, the police dismissed the death as the result of a freak accident. A police detective seeks the rationale between seemingly-unrelated murders, connected only by the appearance of a beautiful woman each time

The Bride Wore Black by Cornell Woolrich