I was about to mention Resnais/Cayrol's MURIEL, which involves the past torture/rape/murder of the title character whom we never see, when someone mentioned REBECCA. I've read about various connections between Resnais and Hitchcock, and it suddenly hit me that there are some interesting parallels between REBECCA and MURIEL (as there are between VERTIGO and LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD). I hesitate to compare REBECCA and MURIEL to UNFORGIVEN in terms of quality (as the original query suggests). They're extremely different films, in three different genres, by three important filmmakers. Since I'm working on Resnais right now, I'll only say that I admire MURIEL as an ambitious attempt to figure a physical, a personal, and a political landscape in one gesture. Muriel herself is central in that respect; she is at the same time the source of Bernard's personal trauma, the repressed of Boulogne as a cityscape, and the victim of Algeria's political trauma. (FYI the film takes place in Boulogne, France. Bernard is a French veteran of the Algerian War, implicated and suffering guilt over the murder of an Algerian woman named Muriel by a group of soldiers. There are no flashbacks to the murder, only the projecting of a kind of homemade travelogue film of Bernard's service in Algeria, over which he gives a fragmented narration of the event. But the film-within-the-film shows only banal scenes of soldier life.) Joshua Hirsch ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]