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Released twenty years ago, Under Suspicion saw big names like Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman and Monica Bellucci take to the big screen in this gripping American-French thriller. Set in the town of San Juan in Puerto Rico and directed by Stephen Hopkins, the film is based on the 1981 French production Garde à Vue and the 1970s British novel Brainwash by John Wainwright.

Hackman plays Henry Hearst, a tax lawyer who seems to have it all – the perfect young wife, the big house on the corner, the success of his career as a lawyer and the respect and admiration from members of the public. Freeman is Victor Benezet, a police captain who isn’t quite as fortuitous as Henry. His wife has custody of his two daughters who live back in the Us whilst he lives alone in a cheap back-alley apartment.

At the start of the film we see Victor...

French film director and close associate of François Truffaut

The film director Claude Miller, who has died aged 70 after a long illness, was continually dogged by comparisons to his friend and mentor François Truffaut. Hardly a review of his films failed to mention Truffaut in some way or another. This came about for various reasons. Miller was Truffaut's production manager on several occasions and made subtle references to the older director's work in many of his own films, almost always mentioning him in interviews. He had a small role in Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970) and adapted La Petite Voleuse (The Little Thief, 1988) from a 30-page screenplay that Truffaut had written a few years before his death.

When Truffaut was once asked whether he had started a school of directors, he denied it. "These people are more influenced by other directors than myself. If Claude Miller has points in common with me,...

Among the casualties of an epoch-making movement in cinema – like the French New Wave – are the talents that don’t get enough recognition because they are perceived to be ‘old fashioned’. If the directors of the French New Wave all embarked in new directions in the 1960s, it cannot be asserted that they were all successful. Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol’s later films, for instance, don’t hold much interest and some films of more conventional directors who appeared at the same time – like Jacques Deray and Michel Deville – often look more interesting today. Many of these filmmakers also did not have a ‘signature style’ so valorized by the New Wave and, even when they made the better films, they received less attention internationally. A filmmaker who emerged a little later but made several brilliant films in the 1970s and 1980s was Claude Miller, who did not stick to...