Influenced perhaps by the extreme pessimism of Samuel Fuller and some of Fritz Lang's American films, Paris Belongs To Us deals with a group of Left-bank students, artists and exiles who are haunted by a vague, unseen menace, some kind of world-wide conspiracy whose secret is known by the theater director (Gianni Esposito) who is the protagonist. Those who like the film find it completely hypnotic in its enclosed description of mid-century anxiety and despair; Sight and Sound went so far as to compare it with the best of Kafka. Others will find Rivette's work irritatingly slow and unpleasantly paranoid. The fact remains that it was one of the key early works of the French New Wave, a veritable cause celebre among the young Parisian critics and filmmakers who defended the film against its stigmatization by exhibitors and the attacks of conventional reviewers. A manifesto signed by Godard, Demy, Chabrol, Truffaut, Resnais, Varda and Melville called it "A fusion of poetic vision and realist expression."