Rider On The Rain (1969) DVD

Charles Bronson certainly took his time getting back across the pond after 1968’s Once Upon a Time in the West. It was an extended Euro-trip that took him from the dust of Southern Spain to the drab streets of London for Nabokov-lite sex-comedy Twinky, (1970), through a fistful of Italian crime capers such as Violent City (also ’70) and to France for both middling revenger Cold Sweat (also ’70) and this marvellous existential puzzler from the director of Plein Soleil. The holiday snaps must be a hoot.

Adapted from a tale by French literary cuckoo Sebastien Japrisot – who also wrote the novel on which A Very Long Engagement (2004) would be based – Rider on the Rain is a freaky-deaky Euro-thriller that twines the dizzying sexual helixes of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels around a muscular plot worthy of prime-rib Hitchcock.

It begins with a mysterioso stranger arriving in an agreeably scruffy, out of season French lakeside resort where he brutalises and rapes a skittish young trophy wife (Marlène Jobert). We are briefly invited to imagine this has all taken place in her mind – and the arrival of the even more mysterioso Charles Bronson on the trail of her assailant does little to dispel these intimations – but this proves to be just one of the many rugs that are to be pulled out from under us. The film goes on to sucker-punch us at every turn, luring us in with genre familiarities before delivering odd little narrative jabs that send us reeling into the next act.

Unnecessary attempts at symbolism – clock pendulums, white garments despoiled, deep-focus hullabaloo – add little to the drama, but director René Clément does a fine job keeping a variety of plates spinning while a deceptively relaxed Bronson drives the action through a distinctly classy production that looks like real money and effort have been spent on it (next up for producer Serge Silberman was Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie).

And while never losing sight of the fact that its audience have been invited on a psychosexual thrill ride, Rider on the Rain flat-out refuses to pander to the sleaze hounds or opt for easy violence when a more realistic – or interesting – opportunity for resolution presents itself.

This is one Euro-pudding that’s done to a turn.

Adam Lee Davies