Innocents with Dirty Hands

Innocents with Dirty Hands (original French title: Les Innocents aux mains sales) is a 1975 French-Italian-West German psychological thriller written and directed by Claude Chabrol, adapted from Richard Neely's novel The Damned Innocents. Set in Saint-Tropez, the story follows Wormser, a wealthy man retired from business who lives with his much younger wife Julie. Suffering from a heart condition that forbids intimacy, he drowns his frustration in drink. Julie takes a lover, Jeff, a writer who lives nearby, and the couple plots to murder Wormser and disguise his death as a boating accident. The scheme goes badly wrong: Julie is horrified to discover that not only has her husband vanished, but so have his fortune and her lover. Romy Schneider stars as Julie opposite Rod Steiger as Wormser, in a twisting crime drama typical of Chabrol's explorations of betrayal and guilt among the well-off.