Rent This Man Must Die (1969)

A Teenage Nightmare - This Man Must Die review by CH

Somewhere, in another Dimension, Cecil Day Lewis must feel rueful every time that, across the Universe, he hears himself described as Daniel Day Lewis's father. And there were perhaps times, on this soil, when he felt similar chagrin at his thrillers and detective stories, published under the name of Nicholas Blake, being preferred to the work which would, none the less, bring him four years as the job of Poet Laureate.

These novels, which began with the mid-Thirties prep.-school setting of A Question of Proof, invariably turned around the sleuthing skills of Nigel Strangeways, inspired by the crumpled figure of that decade's dominant poet W.H. Auden (himself an enthusiast for detective fiction, as was another, older poet Herbert Read). One might have thought that these novels could have been filmed as they appeared. Perhaps his affair with, and marriage to, Jill Balcon upset that influential cinema family. At any rate, the film industry is always fickle. Only one of the novels has appeared upon the screen: The Beast Must Die, a title of Classical precedent. As a film, it first surfaced in, of all places, early-Fifties Argentina and most recently, this year, in an English television series (yet to appear on disc).

Over fifty years ago, and towards the end of Day Lewis's lifetime, it became a notable work by Claude Chabrol as Que la bete meure (1969). We are in provincial France, where a young boy is walking home from a fishing expedition to his widowed father (Michel Duchaussoy) only to be killed by an automobile whose crass driver (Jean Lanne), while shouting at the glamorous woman (Caroline Cellier) at his side, speeds away without any witnesses to the bloodied corpse.

The father is left in a void of diary-keeping grief which sets him upon a trail serendipitously aided by a nearby farmer. Much ensues from that. By way of almost-Bunelian social satire (a fraught household whose country-house fortune turns around a huge automobile repair workshop) we are drawn into cliff-edge and ocean-bound revenge drama.

Here is not the stuff of rapid editing (although one ducks when watching the yacht's sails head this way); Chabrol, as so often, is alert to the well-nigh sedentary way in which horror reveals itself.

For all its antecedent life in print, this is a film which exists in its own right – and keeps one guessing long after the end. We must hope for more Blake on screen – including the back-stabbing world of publishing that is End of Chapter.