Cornell Woolrich (Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich) 1903-1968 is my favourite among all crime fiction
writers and often both melodramatic and with a tortured soul he was the author that best embodied the
Color Black in litterature. Swedish crime fiction expert Jan Broberg sees Woolrich as the big romanticist
of the thriller genre and only compared to Edgar Allan Poe - The Poe of the 1900's.
His biographer Francis M. Nevins calls him "The Poet of the Shadows - Mörkrets poet".

He's something of a writers writer and he was gigantic within his genre already during his lifetime, and
he has become one of the most filmatized of all authors of crime from the Pulp Fiction 1930-1940's era.
Some of the films could be mentioned, as:

The Leopard Man (Jaques Torneur 1943), Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak 1944), Deadline at Dawn,
The Black Angel och The Chase (1946), Fear in the Night och Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948),
The Window (1949), Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock,1954), The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi
Mermaid (Francois Truffaut, 1968-69), Seven Blood Stained Orchids (Umberto Lenzi 1972).

Above pic: Swedish Gebers 1964 pocket book edition (1st Swedish edition 1948)

The Bride Wore Black (1940) was Woolrich's first novel in his Black Series and is today
probably his most famous work, perhaps along with his story Rear Window, filmatized by
Alfred Hitchcock in 1954 with James Stewart in the main role.
It's structured around an effective theme of Revenge where an ice-cold killer with a chameleon's
ability to blend in with different surroundings and then methodically bump off her chosen victims.
What is the pattern, what is the motive for revenge? Will the police find the connection back in
time? In his 1948 novel Rendezvous in Black Woolrich used a variation on the same plot but
changed the sex of the killer.

Novels in the "Black Series" were The Bride Wore Black 1940, The Black Curtain 1941, Black
Alibi 1942, The Black Angel 1943, The Black Path of Fear 1944 and Rendezvous in Black 1948.

La Mariée était en noir (1968)

Is a fine 1968 film version by french director Francois Truffaut, a big fan of Woolrich and the
year after, in 1969 Truffaut filmatizised the bizarre but hauntingly poetic 1947 novel "Waltz into
Darkness" (swedish title: Ljuvliga Bonny, Farliga Bonny, 1947 Centrum förlag) in " La Sirène
du Mississippi ". In The Bride Wore Black / La Mariée était en noir Jeanne Moreau plays the
avenging widow Julie Kohler who takes on a group of unknowing men and murder them one
after another.
Mr. Bliss, Mr. Coral, Mr. Morene, Mr. Delvaux and Mr. Fergus. Will anyone survive the
slaughter and what's the motive, if there's one?

OK, the film is from the late 1960's and in color so that unique black & white Film Noir
atmosphere of the 1940-1950's films may not be present that much, and certainly not Woolrich's
dark and romantic poetry, but the film is fine and Truffaut modernized the plot and the settings
of the novel and he also did some changes regarding the revenge motive and he flipped the
ending twist