Claude Chabrol

In a little village in Brittany, a 10 year old girl is found murdered. René, an artist by profession and the girl's art teacher, is the last person to have seen her. He is immediately questioned by the police inspector in charge.

Jean-Luc Godard's innovative and hugely influential first film, what would become one of the seminal works of the French New Wave. Paying homage to the energy of American gangster B-movies of the 1940s, Godard took his plotline from a news item, supplied by contemporary François Truffaut, in which a cop-killer was harboured by his girlfriend and casually betrayed for the reward money.