Pièges

In Paris, women who reply to lonely hearts ads disappear without a trace. Nightclub dancer Adrienne Charpentier, a colleague of one of those who have gone missing, offers to act as a police “decoy”. She meets various advertisers, including a psychotic fashion designer, who puts her life at grave risk. It turns out that with Adrienne's help, a gang trafficking in girls can be convicted. However, the murders of three women remain unsolved. Suddenly, Adrienne finds clues to the culprit in the desk of nightclub owner and female heart-throb Robert Fleury, the very man she got to know and love during her investigations … Pièges is the “missing link” between Robert Siodmak’s legal drama Voruntersuchung (1931) and his American films noirs. This exciting thriller – with its powerful, central woman figure – describes objectively, and in great detail, the way the police operate, critically questions the work of the judiciary, and provides a psychological profile of the perpetrator. The specifically German contribution to this genre is brilliantly summarised in a single dialogue line. “Have you read Freud?”