J'irai cracher sur vos tombes

Plot synopsis:
Manhattan short story writer Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton) rents an isolated cottage in Kent, Connecticut near the Housatonic River in the Litchfield County countryside to write her first novel. The arrival of the attractive and independent young woman attracts the attention of Johnny, the gas station manager, and Stanley and Andy, two unemployed men. Jennifer has her groceries delivered by Matthew, who is mildly mentally disabled. Matthew is friends with the other three men and reports back to them about the beautiful woman he met, claiming he saw her breasts.
Stanley and Andy start cruising by the cottage in their boat and prowl around the house at night. One day, the men attack Jennifer. She realizes they planned her abduction so Matthew can lose his virginity. She fights back but they rip her bikini off and hold her. Matthew refuses to have sex with her, so Johnny rapes her first; Andy anally rapes her next. After she crawls back to her house, they attack her again. Matthew finally rapes her after drinking alcohol. The other men ridicule her book and rip up the manuscript, and Stanley sexually assaults her. She passes out; Johnny realizes she is a witness to their crimes and orders Matthew to stab her to death. Matthew cannot bring himself to do this, so he dabs the knife in her blood and returns to the other men, claiming he has killed her.
In the following days, a traumatized Jennifer pieces both herself and her manuscript back together. She goes to church and asks for forgiveness for what she plans to do. The men learn Jennifer has survived and beat Matthew up for deceiving them. Jennifer calls in a grocery order, knowing Matthew will deliver it. He takes the groceries and a knife. At the cabin, Jennifer entices him to have sex with her under a tree. She then hangs him, and drops his body into the lake.
At the gas station, Jennifer seductively directs Johnny to enter her car. She stops halfway to her house, points a gun at him, and orders him to remove all his clothing. Johnny insists the rapes were her fault because she enticed the men by parading around in revealing clothing. She pretends to believe this and invites him back to her cottage for a hot bath, where she gives him a handjob. When Johnny says that Matthew has been reported missing, Jennifer states that she killed him; as he nears orgasm, she takes the knife Matthew brought with him and severs Johnny's genitals. She then leaves the bathroom, locks the door, and listens to classical music as Johnny screams and bleeds to death. She dumps the body in the basement and burns his clothes in the fireplace.
Stanley and Andy learn that Johnny is missing and take their boat to Jennifer's cabin. Andy goes ashore with an axe. Jennifer swims out to the boat and pushes Stanley overboard. Andy tries to attack her but she escapes with the axe. Andy swims out to rescue Stanley, but Jennifer plunges the axe into Andy's back, killing him. Stanley moves towards the boat and grabs hold of the motor to climb aboard, begging Jennifer not to kill him. She repeats the same words that he used against her during the sexual assaults: "Suck it, bitch!" Jennifer then starts the motor, disemboweling Stanley. She speeds away as the film ends.

Tags: revenge, murder, melodrama

Review:
Boris Vian disowned it reportedly.... I've not read his novel,so I will not argue,but all that I can say is that the film is a complete disaster ;today in France everybody's forgotten all about the movie .Director Michel Gast has made only four movies in total.The leads ,Antonella Lualdi and Christian Marquand ,had teamed up the precedent year in Astruc's excellent "Une Vie";but Gast left them to their own devices and it has to be seen to be believed.How could we believe Marquand is a black man with a white skin? (Vian's book was a pastiche ,they say)How could we believe that Daniel Cauchy (see Melville's "Bob le Flambeur") and Jean Sorel (Jean Sorel?) are "rebels without a cause "James Dean style?(the electric chair scene takes grotesque to new limits).And this macho racist man played by Paul Guers?And the old man played by veteran Fernand Ledoux ,the best actor in the whole movie,but in his worst part ever.The script is so poor (I do not speak of the lines,particularly those when Guers tells Lualdi she is restive and he will take pleasure in taming her) it's difficult to catch up with the plot.The form is Nouvelle Vague style complete with jazz with borrowings from the American movies (the ending recalls Lang's "You only live once" and too many chase movies).If it's a plea against racism,then it thoroughly fails in its purpose.. Racism rewarded and turned on its head. It may be that the nightmarish quality of my memory of this movie is caused by my having seen it at about 2 a.m. one night in New York at one of those very seedy all-night theaters on Times Square while I was waiting for a 6 a.m. train.  The American "South" portrayed in the film was as phantasmagorical (and real, in its way) as the vision of the country in Kafka's _Amerika_.  As I recall it, the screenplay was quite faithful to Boris Vian's original novel of the same name, and both developed from European stereotypes of American culture, with some probable input from Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell.  The acting was barely tolerable, but the filming technique (again, as I remember it after almost 40 years) made it seem appropriate. Altogether this was a startling and powerful experience, obviously memorable, but I am sure that it was artistically very bad.  Somehow that suggests that some examples of bad art can transcend their own badness, though the reasons are seldom clear.. French film about a racist gang of "rebels without a cause". This film tells the story of a black man, Joe Grant (Christian Marquand) that has white skin, and decides to revenge his brother's death. He goes to a town and starts hanging around the people he thinks are involved in the lynching. The young crowd that should have the style of "Rebel Without a Cause" look more like they came from "La Dolce Vita". The women get crazy about Joe, working in a library. He seems to have ambivalent feelings, almost strangling them at the beginning, and then becoming passionate. He falls in love with a rich girl, Lizbeth Shannon (Antonella Lualdi) which corresponds him, but is engaged to Stan, the gang's leader. Meanwhile Lizbeth's sister Sylvia will try to seduce him. For those who like sports cars of the fifties there is a nice looking Austin Healey. There is love, passion, but most of all hate. After seeing the film I read the Boris Vian book which I disliked, and thought that the film was much better.. Nimble Recollections. When I watched this film to the time of its launching, I was sufficiently surprised, since the french cinema, until then did not approached the subject of the racism (At least in the movies that I had watched). In the truth I already attended films with this type of subject, but they have been produced in Hollywood. What it called the attention was the performance of Christian Marquand, much to the will in the paper of the mestizo who comes back to the city in which happened the shame. Filmed in black-and-white with a musical score that left me souvenir (by the way: it must have left souvenir in all those that had attended the movie), in my opinion was a film that opened way for all the ones that had followed and approached the same subject.