Three Days to Live

Three Days to Live is a French film directed by Gilles Grangier, adapted for the screen by prolific dialogue writer Michel Audiard and built around a cast led by Daniel Gélin, Jeanne Moreau and Lino Ventura. Production moved between the Saint-Maurice Studios just outside Paris and location shoots in the Normandy port towns of Le Havre and Rouen, with the sets designed by art director Roger Briaucourt.

The picture debuted in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival before going on general release, and sources differ slightly on whether that premiere fell in the summer of 1957 or the following year. Character actor Georges Flamant appears in a supporting role alongside Moreau, fitting into the tense, fatalistic register typical of Grangier's crime dramas of the period. The film belongs to the wave of postwar French genre pictures that mixed a gritty urban setting with sharply written dialogue, a combination that made Audiard one of the most sought-after screenwriters working in French cinema through the 1950s and 1960s.