A cult favorite in France that enjoyed a revival here in 1989. Jean Anouilh wrote the script for this noir melodrama, a cruel sketch of the stratified world of a provincial French town. Suzy Delair stars as the imported mistress who draws several of the local men into a deadly competition. The spiritual opposites of Delair and her cuckolded boyfriend (Fernand Ledoux) are to be found in an aging, despised aristocrat (Paul Bernard) and the hunchbacked servant at the inn (Arlette Thomas) who secretly loves him. Stephen Harvey wrote for The Museum of Modern Art's Rediscovering French Film series in 1982: " The principal characters mate film noir archetypes with the stuff that fairy tales are made of....Anouilh's script is a tangled skein of sexual jealousies, intrigues, misalliances, but throughout Pattes blanches, the themes of eros and problems of social caste are so intertwined as to be indivisible. Sex...is the trigger for the underlying tensions of suppressed class antagonisms...in a milieu where social class is destiny."