The Third Lover

The Third Lover (1962)

L'Œil du Malin

Three's a crowd...until she whispered..."three's allowed."

On a work assignment in Germany, failed journalist Albin crosses paths with Andreas, a successful writer, and his wife Hélène, who quickly becomes the apple of Albin’s eye. While Andreas is off on a business trip, Albin tries to seduce Hélèn and, eventually, take over Andreas’ life.

Date of release
1962-05-02
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (49)
Runtime
1h 20m
Genres
Drama, Thriller
Director
Claude Chabrol

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Germany and Bavaria

The Third Lover, also titled The Eye of Evil, is a 1962 French–Italian crime drama film directed by Claude Chabrol. It tells the story of a French journalist in Southern Germany who befriends a novelist and his wife and gradually begins to destroy the couple's lives.

Production and reception

The Third Lover was written by Chabrol and Paul Gégauff under their mutual pseudonym Matthieu Martial and shot on a modest budget. It met with condescending reviews upon its 1962 release and turned out a financial failure.

In Robin Wood and Michael Walker's retrospective analysis in Claude Chabrol (1970), they compare The Third Lover with Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water, which came out a year later. They write, "Knife in the Water was an enormous art house success, l'Oeil du matin a complete box office failure. Both describe a triangle in which a man attaches himself to a married couple and the acting-out of tensions that arise.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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