After a man’s young son dies in a hit-and-run accident, This Man Must Die (1969) quickly concentrates not on the father’s grief, although that is there, but on his thirst for revenge. He intends to find the driver and kill him. Claude Chabrol‘s film, adapted from a novel by Cecil Day-Lewis, deals with furious moral rejection of an individual: namely, Paul Decourt, the driver (finely acted by Jean Yanne). The film’s problem is that Decourt is a man whom no one would tolerate, yet people around him do tolerate him.

Typically, Chabrol insisted on visual or pictorial excellence in Man. It is a damn nice-looking picture. The sequence in which the terrible accident and the aftermath are presented is tastefully done brilliance. Man isn’t great, but it isn’t forgettable either.

(In French with English subtitles)