Such a Pretty Little Beach

This moodily poetic noir unfolds in a seaside resort in the winter offseason where an enigmatic man (Gérard Philipe), on the run after committing a murder, checks into a flophouse hotel where he will confront the ghosts of his past, along the way arousing both the suspicion and sympathy of the fellow lost souls he encounters. Awash in fog-shrouded, rain-swept atmosphere and a sense of inescapable fatalism, this visually mesmerizing existential drama stands as perhaps the defining achievement of director Yves Allégret.