Directed by Henri Colpieditor of Alain Resnais’ first two features, Hiroshima, mon amour and Last Year at Marienbadand coscripted by Marguerite Duras, this melancholy tone poem focuses on a woman who runs a workers’ cafe in a dingy Paris suburb and an amnesiac derelict she comes to believe is her long-lost husband, who apparently was deported to Germany during the war and may have died there. Decidedly pre-New Wave in its conventional narrative style, though attractively filmed in black-and-white ‘Scope, this picture, which won the grand prize at Cannes in 1961, is interesting today mainly as a haunting period piece. With Alida Valli and Georges Wilson. (JR)