If the cinema of Claude Chabrol is anything, it is glib. What could be more glib than that scene in The Third Lover [L'Oeil du Malin] in which the betrayed husband examines some photographs serving as evidence of his wife's infidelity. The shots constitute a gradual progression from indifferent medium shot, the subject squarely and objectively centered within the frame, to oppressively intimate close-up. This is disarmingly glib….

The flexible, functional beauty of this example is modestly intellectual as well as frankly sensational in its appeal. Here is the cinema of basic literacy; Chabrol employs an articulate and correct grammar of film-making. Such exactness of intention and effect immediately recalls Hitchcock, whose name, along with that of Minnelli, invariably arises in a discussion of Chabrol.

Minnelli's influence is most apparent when Chabrol is working in color and "in period," responding to both as he does with a marked sensitivity, as in Landru. An almost excessive concern for the niceties of mise en scène—witness the pivotal representational use of violently contrasting décor in Un Double Tour—would at first suggest that both directors see the world from the point of view of an interior decorator. Such a perception would not be too far from the truth.

This Minnelli strain is not very emphatic in The Third Lover. However, the film does to some extent fall in line with the lush American cinema tradition of "the musical without music," especially as propounded by MGM and exemplified by Minnelli. The Third Lover features enough choreographic fluidity, a well-groomed artifice, and an accumulative attention to production values, on however modest a black and white scale, to qualify it as an entertainment package boasting a certain amount of elegance. Finally, the whole possesses a peculiarly theatrical perfection, the telling, undeniable air of the well-rehearsed. No action is allowed to expand in a leisurely fashion; everything transpires at an aggressive, assured, and, finally, stylized clip. The show, in short, is "well-paced."…

No far cry from Minnelli's cinema of chic is Hitchcock's cinema of shock; both lean heavily on sensation. The Third Lover more than pays its respects to Hitchcock. Aside from the perversely adapted romance-mystery formula, there is the technical dexterity…. (p. 53)

Chabrol's kinship with Hitchcock extends beyond … stylistic and visual similarities to certain psychological and moral foci. One motif recurrent in the Hitchcock canon—the transference of guilt—plays an important role in The Third Lover. Here this theme functions as but a single aspect of the film's overall stress on the narrator's voyeuristic absorption in the lives of his two married friends. Charrier's specific guilt results from an abnormally intense reaction against the husband as second lover and identification with the husband as cuckold. He shares as well an actual instrumentality in the discovery of the adultery and the consequent crime of passion.

Chabrol like Hitchcock then is engrossed in the devastating power of everyday evildoing, evil often originating from exceedingly petty, if vaguely pathological, motivations….

Even more fundamental is a low estimation of humanity which Chabrol and Hitchcock share. Theirs is often a sobering art. They find man prone to perversity, and they find that this perversity snowballs into crime—or, as Chabrol so frequently reminds us in this film and in others, into a state of total warfare and destruction, threatening all life and all decency. (p. 54)