User Reviews

Boileau-Narcejac's novels are anything but boring:everyone knows what Alfred Hitchcock and Henri-Georges Clouzot did with "d'entre les morts" and" "celle qui n'était plus" :"Vertigo" and "les diaboliques" both in the IMDb top 250.

Sergio Gobbi adapted "maldonne" and ,unlike his illustrious (and much superior) colleagues,kept the title of the book.As the first half of the story consisted of frames of mind of the hero,Sergio Gobbi cannot find equivalents -he doesn't even use voice over- and it's a pretty boring affair which the actors' talent (Pierre Vaneck,Jean Topart ,Robert Hossein) or ex-Kirk Douglas's protégée Elsa Martinelli's beauty do nothing to rectify.Like in every Boileau-Narcejac plot,the hero is framed :he's got to play the part of a departed man to allow his widow to latch on to a valuable inheritance.But of course things are not what they seem.The second part,which includes black and white flashbacks (Hossein's nightmares)is barely more exciting than the first one.I will not tell why,because it would be a spoiler but it's stupid to have cast Hossein and Vaneck because they do not look like each other and if the plot made sense ,they should.

The story is interesting enough, there is a visual style or taste and the soundtrack is great... but at some point, the logical flaw is too obvious, regarding the assumption formulated by the "stalking" group about the main character: considering that the events actually take place in late sixties and that they don't talk about the possibility of an aesthetic-surgical operation , the man is young for god-sake and he can't be your guy!... that obvious fact is particularly confirmed by another central character in a dialogue...which of course leads to questioning the logical cover of the whole thing from the very beginning... the characters in such a story are supposed to be perfectly logical when they happen to be planning something so complicated... The book was certainly older than the movie so this basic mistake or "mis-setting" about the date and the backdrop must have been produced by the production, not the writers...

A down-on-his-luck musician thinks he's impersonating a missing millionaire as part of an inheritance scheme but it's only a smokescreen for a Nazi war criminal trying to escape the Mossad...

Although both films use French crime novels from the pulp team of Boileau-Narcejac as source, Sergio Gobbi's MISDEAL (aka EVIL WOMAN) bears no resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO as far as plot goes and there's no reel comparison, artistically, either. That said, MISDEAL is still a sort-of-suspenseful cat-and-mouse thriller with an ironic ending that comes as no big surprise despite the twists and turns the tale takes to get there. The WW II flashback relationship between Elsa Martinelli & Robert Hossein predicts the one between Charlotte Rampling & Dirk Bogarde in THE NIGHT PORTER a half-decade later. Led to believe MISDEAL was adapted from the same Boileau-Narcejac novel Hitchcock used (D'Entre Les Morts/From Among The Dead), this wasn't at all what I was expecting but it didn't suck, either. 7/10

Sergio Gobbi ("Love Me, Strangely") also directed a re-filming of the same novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac that Hitchcock filmed as "Vertigo" in 1959. Gobbi's film, "Maldonne" (or its current U.S. title: "Misdeal") has a similar approach. Gobbi, much more accomplished than he was in "Love Me, Strangely" starring Helmut Berger and Virna Lisi, sets the stage for a much more European "D'entre les morts," but his careful delineation of the story and structures lacks the suspense Hitchcock built. It is an interesting story for this version, involving the Nazi occupation and the repayment of justice to the Jews. Pierre Vaneck and Robert Hossein play the crazy/sane Elsa Martinelli to a similarly to "Vertigo" tragic end. Although not a sequel, one must recall the re-make of "Diabolique" in 1996 changing the ending of the original Clouzot masterpiece. Gobbi's ending is almost predictable, perhaps from familiarity with the story, I'm not sure. Like Hitchcock's film, the use of music by Bernard Herrmann is a strong point and with "Maldonne" Gobbi used Vladimir Cosma's music expertly. The actors are all good, I wonder if there could have been anyone who could have better in the role played by Elsa Martinelli, perhaps a bit not as smart. "Maldonne" ("Misdeal")is Gobbi at his best.