“A prosperous insurance broker finds out that his wife has a secret lover and goes to confront the man in his Paris apartment. An extraordinary conversation follows in which the husband displays a remarkable openness and seemingly liberated attitude, until.... La Femme Infidele turns from a suspense melodrama into a psychological study of the Faithful Husband and a coolly satiric examination of the details of ritualized married life, and then back into a suspense melodrama....” -M.S.

Alfred Hitchcock, along with Fritz Lang, was a paragon for Chabrol, who concentrated (unlike his nouvelle vague colleagues) within one genre, that of the film policier, the “film noir in color.” Like Hitchcock, Chabrol finds the mundane the most useful source of suspense and irony, and, like Hitchcock, never imagines that murder is a simple task: James Monaco writes, “...surely the centerpiece of (La Femme Infidele) is the extended sequence in which poor Charles...methodically if clumsily disposes of the evidence of his murder.... There is so much blood to wash up, and the body is so bulky and awkward....” Monaco finds that “Everyone is always guilty in Chabrol's films. This is a darker, more Langian guilt than we ever see in Hitchcock, where in fact most characters are innocent. Chabrol's people, like Lang's, suffer psychological guilt even when the law overlooks their transgressions, while Hitchcock's people don't....” But this leaves out Rebecca, which makes the film a most interesting precursor to La Femme Infidele.