The Movie:

Before I get to the review of Francois Truffaut's semi-successful homage to the great Alfred Hitchcock, I'd like to advise everyone to stay as far away from MGM's Limited Edition Collection DVD release of The Bride Wore Black as possible. It's expected that a film from MGM's Limited Edition Collection will contain a bare bones presentation with a fairly basic transfer and lack of extras. The point of these releases, just like the ones from niche distributors like Warner Archives and Fox Archives, is to bring a studio's more obscure titles to the relatively small audience that might be interested in them. Hell, these films are usually burned on DVD-Rs, so we know not to expect Criterion-level clarity from the audio and video presentations.

Only including the English dubbed track of a foreign language film on DVD, on the other hand, now that's inexcusable. Not advertising the fact that the DVD only contains the dubbed track, that's pretty much a home video sin in my book. Yes, nowhere on the minimalist box art does it point out the fact that we're not going to get a subtitled version of the film presented with its original audio. I have a feeling that most Truffaut fans will want to see his work in their original form, so I'm pretty baffled by MGM's decision here. It's not like adding an audio and subtitle track would have affected the bit rate all that much. Why did they make this decision on this version when the previous DVD release, as well as the recent Blu-Ray, contains both the original and the dubbed audio?

Let's move on to the movie. Inspired by the many conversations Truffaut had with Hitchcock during the late 60s, later published into a book simply titled Hitchcock, Truffaut decided to pay homage to the master of suspense with a revenge thriller adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich (Under the pen name William Irish), who also wrote the original short story for Rear Window. Instead of subverting the genre the way we expect from a French New Wave auteur, perhaps focusing more or character instead of style and plot, Truffaut goes in the complete opposite direction and constructs a stripped down genre exercise that barely touches on the moral implications of cold blooded murder for pure revenge. Jeanne Moreau's disgruntled bride is not much more than a cold killing machine, an archetype that would later be popularized by 70s exploitation flicks.

The Bride Wore Black is known for another connection to a famous filmmaker, its plot of a bride whose husband was murdered on the day of her wedding going after the five culprits bearing striking similarities to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. Of course, it's not much of a surprise to find out that Tarantino stole from a better director, it would be news if the opposite had happened. In Truffaut's version, the murder is an accident and there isn't a convenient group of covert assassins at play. However, many distinct visual similarities can be found, right down to the protagonists' notepads where they cross out the names of the deceased.

There are very brief scenes, one of them taking place inside a confessional booth, that touch on the morality of the decisions made by Julie (Jeanne Moreau), the pissed-off bride of the story. However, the majority of the running time is devoted to an episodic structure that focuses more on the suspense created by Moreau's inventive approaches to knocking off his victims. Truffaut's somewhat ill fated attempts at aping Hitchcock go as far as hiring Bernard Hermann to score his film. It's interesting that Truffaut and Hermann's previous collaboration, the underrated sci-fi masterpiece Fahrenheit 451, resulted in a score that was more Hitchcockian that the one found in The Bride Wore Black.

The biggest saving grace of the film is the presence of Jeanne Moreau. Her icy exterior mixed with her passionate performance created one of the more memorable femme fatales in film history. Watching her performance, I find it shocking that Hitchcock never cast her in one of his films.

The DVD:

Video:

These niche limited edition releases usually don't contain stellar transfers, since they are the results of fairly basic telecine masters done in order to simply digitize more obscure films. The Bride Wore Black is no exception, with an anamorphic 1:66:1 presentation that's full of scratches and dirt. The scratches become so prevalent that there are some scenes where it becomes hard to make out what's going on in the frame.

Audio:

Here we come to the main complaint I have with this disc. The lack of the original audio track deserves nothing more than zero stars in my opinion, so that's what it gets. If you're really curious, the lossy 2.0 mono dubbed track is satisfactory, if a bit too tinny at parts. The dubbing work lacks energy and sounds too monosyllabic at times.

Extras:

We only get a Trailer.

Final Thoughts:

I find The Bride Wore Black to be a somewhat fascinating yet misguided attempt of a legendary auteur trying to copy another legendary auteur. However, even if you're a big fan of this film, I can't recommend this particular release due to the poor video transfer and especially the lack of original audio.

Oktay Ege Kozak is a film critic and screenwriter based in Portland, Oregon. He also writes for The Playlist, The Oregon Herald, and Beyazperde.com