Synopsis
Joy House (Les Félins, 1964) is René Clément's crime thriller, available to watch online on iFILM. Mark, a young chancer, has seduced the wife of American gangster MacKin — and now MacKin wants him dead. On the run, Mark takes cover in a charity shelter on the French Riviera.
There a wealthy widow named Barbara spots him and brings him into her grand mansion as her private chauffeur. She doesn't live alone: her younger cousin Melinda shares the house, and both women smother the fugitive in a strange, possessive kind of care. The longer Mark stays, the clearer it gets that he wasn't rescued so much as lured. Polite smiles hide cold calculation, and it's never obvious who is playing whom. Alain Delon plays the cornered charmer, with a young Jane Fonda as the cousin you can't quite read.
Clément builds a cool, elegant trap in the vein of 1960s French noir, with sharp black-and-white photography and a score by Lalo Schifrin. It's for anyone who loves old, sly thrillers where the scheming matters more than the chases. Stream Joy House (1964) online on iFILM.
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