The Catamount Killing

Buchholz plays a bank manager from the big city demoted to the small Vermont town of Catamount. It's not long before he's having a torrid romance with his landlady and both are scheming to relieve the bank of a big payroll delivery. So far, so noir. But the film heads off down its own idiosyncratic path, with an absurdist heist, a Torn Curtain-like murder of protracted horror, and a finale in which retribution arrives not via greed or mistrust but because the transgressors are unable, finally, to suppress their moral scruples. It's very tentatively handled by Zanussi, who seems ill at ease in his first English-language production, adapted from I'd Rather Be Poor by James Hadley Chase.