La Tête contre les Murs

Franju's first feature (after a notably idiosyncratic career as a director of shorts) confirmed his stature as a poet of the darker regions of the human psyche, and his vision as that of one of the cinema's least blinkered social moralists. It deals with an upper middle class dropout (played by Mocky, who scripts and intended to direct it himself) who finds himself in an insane asylum after committing 'irrational' acts of vandalism aimed against his father; he breaks out with an epileptic friend (Aznavour, in his first screen role), and lands in deeper water than ever... It's part psychological thriller, part subversive bourgeois drama, and all film noir of the most devastating sort.