A Shot in the Dark Theater Window Card | David Pollack Vintage Posters

1963

Mozelle Thompson

A Shot in the Dark

Author Marcel Achard (from the play L'Idiote); Adapted by: Harry Kurnitz; Directed by Harold Clurman, Starring: Elizabeth Seal, Zack Matalon, and René Paul, with Valerie French, James Coco, Bram Nossen, and Edith Lebok; Presented by: Leland Hayward

Ford’s Theatre (Baltimore)

Courtroom comedy-mystery centering on Josefa Lantenay, a free-spirited, guileless, and thoroughly candid housemaid employed by an aristocratic Parisian family, found unconscious, naked, and clutching a pistol next to the dead body of her lover, the wealthy family’s Spanish chauffeur. When she is brought before Paul Sevigne, an earnest and newly appointed Parisian examining magistrate handling his very first high-profile case, her guilt seems to be an absolute open-and-shut certainty. However, as Josefa candidly defends herself by exposing a scandalous tangled web of overlapping affairs—revealing that she was concurrently involved with both the deceased chauffeur and her aristocratic employer, the elite banker Benjamin Beaurevers—the smitten magistrate risks his own judicial career by following his gut instinct that she is too innocent and naive to be the killer. As the investigation expands, it devolves into a delightfully absurd tangle of conflicting testimonies, hidden motives, and elite corruption, ultimately culminating in a series of sharp comedic twists where Sevigne successfully outwits the powerful household to expose the true culprit.