Product Details

• Actors: Madeleine Robinson, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Antonella Lualdi, Bernadette Lafont, AndrĂ© Dino
• Directors: Claude Chabrol
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Language: French
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: KINO VIDEO
• DVD Release Date: November 22, 2005
• Run Time: 110 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000BT994S
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #189,149 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "A Double Tour" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

A double tour, Claude Chabrol's third film, is his debut psychological thriller, a genre he subsequently transformed in films like Les Bonnes Femmes and L'Enfer. Through (expert use of flashbacks and vignettes - NY Times) Chabrol creates a lurid and disturbing melodrama of infidelity, obsession and murder at a vineyard in rural Provence.

Vintner Henri Marcoux (Jacques Dacqmine) brazenly carries on an affair with a beautiful young neighbor (Antonella Lualdi) right under the nose of his bitter wife Thérèse (Madeleine Robinson). Henri's gorgeous daughter has herself caught the eye of a Hungarian ne'er do well (Jean-Paul Belmondo), while Henri's voyeur son begins to take liberties with his father's mistress. As the family's passions ripen, the stage is set for tragedy.

Demonstrating (a flair for the camera and characterization - NY Times) Chabrol leads his gifted cast through (fine performances - NY Times). Italo-Greek ingénue Antonella Lualdi is a (dark, striking beauty who could easily turn a man's head - NY Times), and storied French stage actress Madeleine Robinson (Orson Welles' The Trial) received the Best Actress prize at the 1959 Venice Film Festival for her role. Belmondo is magnetic in his final part before Breathless (in which he used his character's name from A double tour as an alias) catapulted him to international stardom.

Released in the US as Leda in 1961, Variety called A double tour a (sleek whodunit,) with (good camera work and tricky direction.) Viewed today, A double tour's swooping camera and character eccentricity echo both Alfred Hitchcock's most personal and obsessive films and Douglas Sirk's colorful 1950s melodramas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Chabrol in progress!, December 17, 2009

By 

Hiram Gomez Pardo (Valencia, Venezuela) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Double Tour (DVD)

This film explores one of the favorite issues of Chabrol. The decadence of a wealthy family involved into a dark affair respect the mistress of a bored husband and a dysfunctional family.

This bored marriage has two sons, a beautiful daughter who is in love with a good for nothing (Jean Paul Belmondo) who has an unemployed and unworried friend, and his brother a man of good manners and weird behavior.

An undated suspense film whose Hitchcokian approach is more than obvious, specially in the opening sequence that works out as an homage to "Vertigo".

Don't miss it.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pick a Genre - And Deviate from Every Possible Convention for that Genre, March 17, 2006

By 

Anthony E. Whitaker "Head Scratcher" (Virginia Beach, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Double Tour (DVD)

I enjoyed this movie very much. I was lucky to see it without reading the DVD cover (avert your eyes from the image of the cover on this site!!) or any reviews of it, and that's the best way to see this one. That's because this movie is of a particular genre, but, unless you've been tipped off, you won't realize which genre until 2/3 of the way through it. Then, suddenly, it will dawn on you - "Oh! I get it! That's what's been set up for me in the 1st hour". I have to believe Chabrol deliberately listed all the common conventions for this type of film and then said to himself: "In my film of this type, I'm going to violate every single one of these conventions, and I'm still going to end up with an entertaining film.". I think he succeeded. I give it only 4 stars because there are certain reasons why most films of this genre follow the conventions. I would have given it 5 stars if Chabrol had adhered to just 1 of those conventions in particular. Anyways, getting 4 stars after violating all the conventions is really equivalent to 5 stars. I think this one will have broader appeal than the other Chabrol films I've seen. It's a bright, sunny, colorful, energetic, fast-paced film - often even cheerful - with a Hitchcockian feel in some ways, but definitely not Hitchockian in most ways. I really like the way the time line is handled, too, which I think is the source of the title. It's one of the most original, creative films I've seen. I like it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Directors, even French New Wave ones, seldom always hit home runs. Even so, if you like Chabrol then give this one a try, August 26, 2008

By 

C. O. DeRiemer (San Antonio, Texas, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Double Tour (DVD)

The Marcoux family -- husband, wife, daughter, son -- live at their vineyard in Provence. Henri Marcoux, 45, is weak, with a lovely young redheaded mistress who lives next door. Therese Marcoux is possessive, sly and goes to Mass quite often. She tells her husband she'll turn a blind eye to the mistress as long as there's no scandal and he throws out the lout who has become their daughter's boy friend. They are not a loving pair. "Listen to me, Henri," she tells him, "accept my offer or it's good-bye to the redhead. I swear on the heads of my children I'm not joking. Either Laszlo leaves tonight or you never see your redhead again!" "Who do you think you're talking to?" he screams at her. "I'm your wife, Henri!" "You're nothing to me," he says, with his face just inches from hers. "You make me want to vomit. You're hateful, ugly, stupid, uncultured, hypocritical, mean...old! So old!"

We shouldn't forget that their daughter is vapid. Their son is unpleasantly odd. He favors Mozart and Berlioz and conducts the music himself. He sometimes speculates about the maid and about his sister. The young maid enjoys leaning out her upstairs window in only her bra to tease the gardener and welcome her boy friend, who delivers the milk each morning. And Laszlo (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is usually around, loud and coarse. When he eats a soft-boiled egg he leaves more yolk on his face than there is on the plate. He's the kind of jocular, sardonic drunk you don't want to sit next to at a bar.

When a murder occurs, the only question is which one of the above will have been on the receiving end and which one did the deed. They're all reasonable suspects for either role...which, for me, is the problem with this movie. This was Claude Chabrol's third film and his first in color. He plops the characters down for us to observe, but often assumes that we're adult enough to figure out for ourselves such idle things as specific motivation. That all the characters lack either warmth or, in some cases, much intelligence, adds a layer of distance to this film. On the one hand, the set-up works nicely. For the first thirty minutes Chabrol gives us little vignettes of the family members and their relationships. These vignettes are so amusingly unpleasant I was hoping a solid, sly black comedy might emerge. But then the story started. There's little dynamic in a middle-aged, weak man going ga ga over, I mean falling in love with, a lovely, compliant and well-built red head. The aggressive unpleasantness that sums up Belmondo's character, which Chabrol ultimately uses as a device for truth telling, left me cold. Belmondo at 26 brings the energy this movie generally lacks, but Laszlo is a pain in the neck. (It doesn't help that, at certain angles, the young Belmondo resembles the young George Hamilton.) And perhaps it was because this was Chabrol's first color film, but he seems at times to have fallen in love with color as a way to underline romance. In the middle of the movie there is a long, romantic walk through the green-dappled woods by our lovers. They come across some poppies, sink to the ground and start some serious fumbling with their clothes. Then the camera slowly pans up to a vast field of orange poppies, then to a blue, blue sky...with the music soaring. This is Chabrol? The conclusion is arrived at only after a long narrative flashback that leads up to our witnessing the murder. Homicide shouldn't be bland, but this one was.

If you're fond of Chabrol, as I am, you'll want to see this as an example of Chabrol still learning to bicycle with the training wheels on. It's testimony to his talent and craftsmanship that they didn't stay on for long.

The movie was based on a novel by that great American short story writer, Stanley Ellin. He was one of the masters of the form, but because he wrote mystery short stories he never rated the sort of literary awe given to writers like the two Johns, Cheever and Updike. To find out just how good a short story writer Ellin was, buy a copy of The specialty of the house and other stories: The complete mystery tales, 1948-1978. You might grow weary of suburbanite angst, but I'm willing to bet you'll treasure Ellin.