Louis Malle's initial contribution to the collection of films, growing by leaps and bounds in the years after The Sorrow and the Pity, about Europe under Fascism: a studiously cool and unsentimental portrait of a French peasant who, rejected by the Resistance because of his youth, is diverted into collaboration with the Nazis, and who, playing with his new power, forces his attentions on a pale, blonde, scrubbed-face Jewish girl named, not too subtly, "France." The prefatory line from Santayana, about those who don't remember the past being condemned to repeat it, tips us off that we are to be led around by the hand for a while. And the footing early in the movie is, at that, the most treacherous: when the adolescent anti-hero is first introduced, he's dividing his time between a janitorial job in a provincial hospital and leisure hours at the family farm, and there are shots of bedpans, a beheaded chicken, five rabbits shotgunned in sequence, and a wee yellow bird picked off its branch with a slingshot. And so, early on, this youth, thick in the skull and the skin, takes on the look of a Psych. Lab. specimen. (Pierre Blaise, killed in a traffic accident a year after the movie was released, is perfectly cast as the Fascist Punk: a sort of Frankie Darro hoodlum, a blockhead with a square-cut jaw and slit-like indentations for eyes.) Once past the groundwork, it becomes pretty intriguing to observe a central character who is marked by his complete detachment, his indifferent drift into casual evil, and his dull-witted responses -- unexcitable, unblinking, unjudging. Malle plays on the mismatches of his responses with ours, but the distancing effect, in this case, is rather more reassuring than unsettling. Good work with the dense soundtrack and with the dark, rainy-day colors (Tonino Delli Colli, cinematographer). (1974) — Duncan Shepherd