Highway Pick-Up

Robert Hossein and Jean Sorel are locksmiths who decide to rob a rich man whose safe they have recently repaired. But the man and his wife return unexpectedly and they kill the man. Sorel gets away, but Hossein is convicted of murder. Two years later, he escapes from prison and meets Georges Wilson in the Maritime Alps. Wilson takes him to his truck stop and diner where his sluttish young wife, Catherine Rouvel....

Sounds like THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, doesn't it? For half the movie it looks like it it. But this is from a novel by James Hadley Chase, and the director is Julien Duvivier. Duvivier's movies were one of the sources of film noir, but it's not the world that is corrupt, it's the people in the story he is telling. In the 1930s, his brand of poetical realism was tempered by having Jean Gabin in his movies,. Now, however, the principals are not doomed through the workings of fate, but by their weakness and evil. Sometimes society will exact the price. If not, then there is always the universe.