This power-duel between two great talents, Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret, begins like most of Gabin's gangster dramas, as a police car speeds along the increasingly decrepit housing units of a city's outer ring. The crime, however, has been happening for years: the slow strangulation of the love two people once had. Signoret once may have been a beautiful trapeze artist, and Gabin a handsome newspaperman, but now their full–time jobs are despising one another. They still do everything at the same time, only in separate worlds: eating dinner at separate tables, then flicking each other notes in lieu of speech. When Gabin brings home a cat, however, their dueling inertias finally blossom into confrontation. Director Granier–Deferre frames the married couple among still tableaux of household normalcy, juxtaposing a symphonic soundtrack of chores against their increasing silences, but this caustic, painfully amusing film belongs entirely to Gabin and Signoret, two "tough old birds" who put a lifetime of acting talent into revealing a love changed to hate.