Labbé, a hatter in a French provincial town, appears to lead the life of a respectable citizen but is in fact a serial murderer. The only person to suspect this is his neighbour, Kachoudas, an Armenian tailor. After Labbé kills his own wife, he kills six of her friends to stop them from visiting her and prepares to murder a seventh, who dies naturally. As a substitute, he murders the maid. Labbé soon confesses his crime to the dying Kachoudas. After getting drunk, he visits his favourite prostitute, Berthe, and kills her; he is found at the scene of the crime in the morning by police.
TV Guide rated the film with 2 1/2 out of 5 stars and commented:
Another Claude Chabrol film that neither fails nor lives up to his previous successes (LES BICHES, among others). Again he pays homage to Hitchcock with a psychopath, Michel Serrault, who murders his wife, then kills six of her elderly friends.[2]
The hatter (Serrault) is a mass strangler who allows his secret to be discovered by hangdog Cachoudas (Aznavour), the tubercular Armenian tailor opposite. The ensuing relationship seems unbelievably reckless, even with a mad hatter involved, and manifestly it's the Hitchcocko-Jesuitical theology about shared guilt which animates the picture... Chabrol locates his adaptation in an off-kilter time zone – little bit '30s, little bit '50s – that some may find the most intriguing aspect of the movie.[3]
