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In Innocents with Dirty Hands (1975), Claude Chabrol’s uncharacteristically keyed-up thriller, few people say what they mean or are thinking what you think they are. It’s a twisty, sometimes ingenious potboiler. The mechanics of the plotting, not its emotional and psychological contours, are meant to grab you. Adapted from Richard Neely’s The Damned Innocents (1971) — a book I haven’t read but, based on what this movie projects, takes after James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1943) — Innocents with Dirty Hands focuses in on Julie (Romy Schneider), the discontented, much-younger wife of a churlish rich man named Louis (a dubbed-to-death Rod Steiger). 

Before Louis’ retirement, the couple, who met a few years ago when Julie was still a hopeful actress, was somewhat happy. But without his work, Louis’ most destructive traits — like his propensity for the bottle and his inability to speak or act with a filter — have come to the fore and stayed put. (He’s also suffering from impotence, and recently had a heart attack.) Julie seems to live every day regretting marrying him. The walls of the airy St. Tropez manse the pair has absconded to seem only to be closing in, however much Louis buys Julie new cars and other sparkly trinkets as material apologia. 

When Julie meets Jeff (Paolo Giusti), a hot neighbor with a flagging writing career, she sees an out. He’s not merely a sexual escape — their meet-cute comes with the kite he’s flying landing on her butt while she’s sunbathing in the buff — but, to her frustrated mind capable of going to dark places, also a potentially good assistant for what many married femmes fatales in movies are quite good at convincing their new lovers to do: help her murder her no-good-but-well-off spouse and stage it like an accident so that money can be inherited and new lives run off to. 

Knowing it won’t ultimately be too important in a soon-to-be elaborately plotted film, Chabrol doesn’t dwell much in the details of this new affair. Jeff and Julie sleep together once; the film jumps three weeks into the future; then it’s the night the pair plans to hit go on their possibly-foolproof murder plot. I won’t talk too much more to avoid spoiling the many pleasurable turns the movie takes, but I will say there comes up two stressful problems that turn everything into living hell. After Julie thinks she’s successfully bludgeoned her husband to death in bed, the body disappears when she steps away. (Maybe she ought to have pulled back the covers ostensibly covering every inch of him.) Then Jeff vanishes, seemingly along with every cent sitting in Louis’ bank account. 

Romy Schneider in Innocents with Dirty Hands.

Innocents with Dirty Hands is convoluted in an entertaining way. It’s fearless presenting a plot twist that could be considered unbelievable. And it’s also at ease when unexpected comedy intrudes, usually courtesy of the two detectives (Jean Rochefort and François Maistre) sympathetic to Julie when she cries missing husband until they can’t ignore the skepticism ballooning in their stomachs. 

Giving an extraordinary, somehow both lushly emotive and inscrutable performance, Schneider is a sturdy anchor. She does genuinely stunning work that makes you take this material a little more seriously. Yet you’re always aware she knows exactly what kind of movie this is; she seems to relish in trying on this deadly-woman archetype. Even still, Julie isn’t a neo-Phyllis Dietrichson. She’s not unambiguously coded as inherently evil, weaponizing sex maliciously. Things are coded as more probable that she’s a truly desperate woman who, as the machinations of the plot increasingly seem to move from her favor, realizes how much she may not be cut out for this particular kind of ruthlessness. (Or so it seems: the character remains intentionally hard to read until the movie’s very end, when all safely can be revealed.)

Fun as it is, Innocents with Dirty Hands doesn’t necessarily commit to being a turn-your-brain-off sort of popcorn thriller where surprising us supersedes all. Underneath the many jittery plot maneuvers, Chabrol seems to be getting at, especially as the police take up more space in the narrative, how misogyny can factor into how women are punished in a male-dominated justice system, and also into where the unhappiness of a marriage is most blamed. Innocents with Dirty Hands is far from Chabrol’s best movie, but it’s also, with his trademark precision loosened up a bit, among his most straightforwardly entertaining.