Directed by Joseph Losey • 1962 • France, Italy
Starring Jeanne Moreau, Stanley Baker, Virna Lisi

Blacklisted ex-Hollywood director Joseph Losey’s reinvention as a voice of coolly stylized European art-house cinema in many ways began with this Venice-set tale of romantic obsession, gorgeously photographed in modernist monochrome. Stanley Baker plays a successful but fraudulent Welsh writer whose delirious infatuation with the alluring call girl Eva (Jeanne Moreau), who cares only for money, leads him down a path of degradation and personal tragedy. Moreau, at her most sultry chic, makes for one of the screen’s most striking and unforgettable femme fatales.