René Clément, fresh off the success of Purple Noon (another Delon vehicle), opted to shoot iJoy House in lush black-and-white. This choice turned the Mediterranean villa into a labyrinth of shadows. While the plot sounds like a standard potboiler, Clément treats the house itself as a character—a gilded cage where everyone is both predator and prey. Clément also wrote the script with Pascal Jardin and Charles Williams, which was based on the book Joy House by Day Keene.

Marc (Alain Delon) is a gambler on the run, not too many steps ahead of gangsters who want him for sleeping with their boss’s wife. He ends up getting work for Barbara (Lola Albright, Peter Gunn‘s girlfriend) as a driver. Of course, her young niece Melinda (Jane Fonda) becomes attracted to the roguish man, but soon they learn that Barbara is hiding another man, Vincent (André Oumansky), in her house, keeping him almost as a slave after he killed her husband for her. They plan on killing Marc and using his passport to get away from the police. Marc and Barbara are also sleeping together, so Vincent kills her, and the gangsters mistake him for Marc and kill him. Whew!

That’s not the end of things. Melinda helps Marc get rid of the bodies, but when she figures out that he’s leaving town, she calls the police and keeps him, just like she learned from Barbara. Fonda’s performance is pivotal. She starts as the ingénue, but the film tracks her evolution from a curious girl to a cold-blooded successor. By the end, she isn’t just saving Marc; she’s collecting him. The cycle of the house remains unbroken; only the warden has changed.

A few years ago, Fonda revealed that Clément tried to have sex with her, but she refused. He was 51 at the time, while she was only 27. He wasn’t the only one who tried this; she was asked by Delon as well. Clément’s move was that “he wanted to do it because her character had to have an orgasm in the movie and he needed to see what Fonda’s orgasms were like.” Afterward, he was kind for the rest of filming and never asked again. As for Delon, he was at the height of his “most beautiful man in the world” fame. His off-screen reputation for being difficult and predatory often bled into his roles, making his portrayal of the desperate Marc feel uncomfortably authentic.