Critics reviews

The last half-hour is just hollow style - the film becomes trite when it emerges that the hero isn't a weak man but a man who's lost his ideals, and can now recover them - but does remain stylish; the rest of it is quite a deft melding of film noir and arthouse, its pretensions typified by the fact that the seedy blackmailer isn't Dan Duryea but a middle-aged art critic who briefly rails against high society in between blackmailing.

A communist, Bardem stayed, struggled, and was jailed more than once; he was in prison when he won an award at Cannes for this creepy, claustrophobic 1955 melodrama... As in Bardem's still greater Calle Mayor (1956), Death of a Cyclist follows the antifascist strategy Henri-Georges Clouzot used in Le Corbeau for Vichy-era France, transposing the ugliness of power relations in a repressive society to the spheres of sex and gossip.