La menace (1977)

Uncertain whether I have seen this before; if so, it was between 1983 and 1986.

English title: The Threat.

*spoilers below*
A manager in a trucking company who was in a relationship with his boss has a new girlfriend and intends to quit the company to start his own business. His ex will not accept their breakup. There is an incident between the two women which finishes with the ex committing suicide. The circumstances make it appear as though she was murdered. The male protagonist tries to conceal his girlfriend's involvement in the incident, but she has left traces of it which are easily found out by the police. She is arrested. He devises a complicated scheme to lead the police to believe that he was the real culprit -- in order to collect the dead woman's inheritance -- and has framed his girlfriend. The police falls for it. The woman is released. The man flees to Canada where he stages his own death and calls up his girlfriend, setting up to meet her in Melbourne. Things then go horribly wrong.
*end of spoilers*

The final section with the trucks is quite harrowing and well done. The film as a whole however is predominantly an exercise in sadism of a cerebral -- though not exactly plausible -- kind. I guess the whole enterprise is not wholly despicable as a lot of mental -- and supposedly physical -- effort went into it. Perhaps the hidden moral of it is that life's difficult situations arouse extraordinary powers in a person's brain which are normally dormant when they could be used to prevent those difficulties.

Rating: 40