Louis Malle's first feature is an elegant thriller set to an improvised score by Miles Davis. Maurice Ronet and Jeanne Moreau star as an ex-paratrooper and his lover who plot to murder her industrialist husband. But their perfect murder goes awry: he becomes trapped in an elevator, his escape car is stolen by two teenagers on a spree which itself ends in murder, and Moreau is left to search for him. Adroitly bringing in the wider issues of war, industry and run-away machines, Malle creates a world for his frantic, frustrated lovers, while Miles Davis' music becomes an abstraction of their punctuated existence. In his book, French Cinema Since 1946, Roy Armes writes, “Malle's sense of style is...always apparent: first-rate performances from his leading players, a feeling for authentic settings, an improvised jazz backing by Miles Davis, some excellent photography by Henri Decae, and a sequence of probing shots depicting Jeanne Moreau wandering through Paris alone, seeking news of her missing lover, which anticipates the performance Malle succeeded in drawing from his star in his next film (Les Amants, 1958).”