Claude Chabrol's La Route de Corinthe | The Road to Corinth (1967)

La Route de Corinthe isn't one of Chabrol's most serious films: it's a spy spoof with a strong sense of the ridiculous. It's also a showcase for Jean Seberg (Shanny), whose French accent has really improved in the seven years since À bout de souffle, unless she was putting the American accent on then. The story behind it is about black boxes being smuggled into Greece to interfere with NATO radar: cue for Chabrol to play a deal of stereotypical Greek background music. Magician Socrate (Steve Eckhardt) sets the scene for the farce right from the beginning: at the frontier check he produces his passport out of the custom's officer's hat, his car is full of doves and rabbits, and a black box is found, meaning he's beaten up by the cops until he automatically magics a cheroot, splits it in two and swallows a cyanide capsule. No time for melodrama: this is sheer farce.

(Literal) cliff-hangers are, as are many casual murders, the order of the day, as the film moves from a quarry with a black box hidden in a head, to a chase via a rose petal trail through a cemetery with a cavernous chapel of rest, and on and on.

Shanny occupies most of the film, and certainly not only because her accent was probably very sexy to the French, and most of the characters want to bed her, probably even the slow-witted Josio (Paolo Giusti), who like the other non-French actors speaks fluent French: subtleties aren't on the menu here. Shanny's husband Robert Ford (Christian Marquand) has been assassinated before he can discover the clue to the black boxes, so she continues in his place, later with the help of intelligence agent Dex (Maurice Ronet). The end is as ludicrous as it begins, with Shanny kissing Dex on the homeward bound plane admidst a host black-attired, black-hatted orthodox Greeks.

This film (made not long before Chabrol made Les Biches) is one of his money spinners, a piece of fluff, but an amusing piece of fluff.