- Seemingly unsatisfied merely to conduct the definitive Alfred Hitchcock interview, The Bride Wore Black represents Francois Truffaut's attempt to go one step further and actually make a Hitchcock film. From Cornell Woolrich's shocking source material to Bernard Herrmann's score, the homage is intentionally obvious. Frankly, it's a testament to Truffaut's great talents that such an attempt is not a complete failure. Sure, it's not as good as a dozen of Hitchcock's films, but then again, what is?
- As the film opens, it's not completely clear to the audience what has transpired. We witness a lovely woman named Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau) try to throw herself out a window, only to be held back. Next thing we know, she's eluding her relatives to go flirt with a ladies' man (Claude Rich) at his own wedding. Their relationship comes to a crashing halt when Julie pushes him off a balcony. The next time we see Julie, she's wooing a lonely fellow (Michel Bouquet) in a private box at the symphony. Before long, he ends up poisoned. And so on, with a lusty father's (Michael Lonsdale) suffocation and an artist's (Charles Denner) elaborate death by bow-and-arrow. The only person left on her checklist is the convicted criminal Delvaux (Daniel Boulanger), but Julie's hardly the sort of person to allow prison bars to get in her way.
- The motivation behind Julie's strange vendetta eventually become clear both to the audience and to the victims' mutual friend (Jean-Claude Brialy), but it's not clear that anyone else lives to piece together the puzzle. In this respect, Truffaut ends the film on a considerably different note than Hitchcock would have, the latter preferring to explicitly punish his murderers, possibly by having them fall from a national monument. In all other respects, however, Truffaut succeeds in emulating Hitchcock's directorial style and even manages to sneak in some interesting subtext about how men view the women in their world. As mentioned, the result is not quite as impressive as a real Hitchcock film or, for that matter, a less derivative Truffaut film, but it is a rare example of one talented auteur successfully imitating another.
- Based on Cornell Woolrich's novel of the same name.
