Rider on the Rain 1970

Opening with a nod to Lewis Carroll, the film settles into a rainy autumn afternoon on the south coast of France. Mellie, portrayed by Marlène Jobert, is newly married to Toni Mau, an airline navigator who is away at work. A strange man disembarks from a bus and, later, watches her as she tries on a wedding dress in a shop. When he slips into their home, Mellie is tied up and assaulted. She frees herself, uses a shotgun to kill him, and then drives the body to a cliff, saying nothing to her jealous husband when he returns.

The next day at the wedding, an uninvited American named Col. Harry Dobbs, played by Charles Bronson, speaks to Mellie. A body has been found and he claims she killed him, a charge she denies. The day after that, with Toni away again, Dobbs slips back into their house and questions Mellie roughly, his persistence growing more aggressive. She begins to fear that the rapist may have had business with Toni, perhaps drug-related, and that connection fuels Dobbs’s interrogation. Desperate for the truth, she withdraws all her money at the bank and offers it to him, but he wants something more elusive than cash—truth.

The following morning, Mellie discovers the rapist’s travel bag, a cache containing a staggering 60,000 dollars. Intrigued and unsettled, she slips into Dobbs’ hotel room to search for clues and uncovers evidence that Dobbs is not merely an ordinary officer but a US Army colonel engaged in a covert mission.

Dobbs then confesses that a woman employed at a Parisian restaurant has been arrested for the murder. Fueled by a sense of injustice, Mellie boards a plane to Paris, heads to the restaurant, and is redirected to the arrested woman’s sister—who runs a brothel. Inside that shadowy workplace, Mellie endures intense interrogation by three criminals who crave information about the deceased man. Just as danger peaks, Dobbs, who has followed her trail, intervenes and rescues her from harm.

Back at home, Dobbs reveals the corpse was not the rapist’s but another man’s. The rapist had been an escapee from a US military prison and had attacked three other women in similar fashion before Mellie. She finally tells him where she tipped the body, which police frogmen later recover. For Dobbs, the case is closed, and he does not alert the police to Mellie’s involvement or the 60,000 dollars.

In a final Hitchcockian nod, the rapist’s name is revealed to be Mac Guffin.