This Man Must Die (Que la bête meure)

Claude Chabrol directed the 1969 psychological thriller This Man Must Die, a French-Italian production whose original title is Que la bête meure. British cinemas also showed it under the title Killer!. Combining crime fiction and drama, it follows a thirst for revenge through to a reckoning, and it is known in Portugal as Réquiem para um Desconhecido and in Brazil as A Besta Deve Morrer. It also appears on the New York Times list of the thousand best films of all time.

The story centres on a father who loses his only son in a hit-and-run accident. His grief and despair harden into resolve: he sets out to find the driver and kill him, and the search leads to a complex face-to-face with the killer. Michel Duchaussoy, Caroline Cellier, Jean Yanne and Anouk Ferjac lead the cast, with Marc di Napoli, Maurice Pialat, Dominique Zardi, Michel Charrel and Jean-Louis Maury also appearing.

The film is adapted from the 1938 novel The Beast Must Die, a crime story Cecil Day-Lewis wrote under the pen name Nicholas Blake. Chabrol prepared the screenplay together with Paul Gégauff. The film is in French and runs 112 minutes.