At the very opening, we see a Swiss police officer stop beside a parked car on a hillside. The officer opens the door. There is a corpse inside with a bullet hole in his temple.

So what does the policeman do? Does he go back to his own car and radio headquarters to report a homicide? Does the police force descend upon the crime scene, seal it off with tape to preserve its integrity, and examine the ground and take photos of the body? No. No, the policeman gets into the dead man's car, starts it up, and drives into town with the corpse nodding beside him. A woman in a passing car is horrified by the sight of the bloody head, so the officer tries to perch his own police cap atop the corpse. The attempt is unsuccessful and the body jiggles and collapses against the dash.

Now that's a weird opening for a murder mystery but then this film is something outré from beginning to end. The story, by the well-known Swiss author, Friedrich Durrenmatt, involves no more than the usual number of convolutions and winds up with a surprise ending. But the direction is by Max Schell, a highly underrated actor, who's done some enterprising work as a director too.

He opts for a considerably stylized approach to the material. "I think I'm going to croak," groans the police commissioner (Martin Ritt, also an actor/director), sounding more like a man complaining of a hangover. "Well, I hope you feel better!" chirps his assistant, John Voight, in a completely anomalous, cheery tone of voice.

Ritt's commissioner really is ill and is schedule for an operation in a short while that may give him an extra year of life. A consequence of his illness is that he can't eat anything or drink any stimulating fluids. Throughout the film, maddeningly, others keep offering him schnapps or a piece of cake, all of which he must refuse until the reveal at the end, when he solves the case and, with gusto, stuffs himself full of soup, wurst, sauerkraut, and huge wedges of Emmenthaler cheese.

But, as I say, there are unexpected incidental touches in almost every scene. The initial corpse turns out to be that of another police officer. And we see perhaps two dozen people dressed in dark clothes standing around in the autumnal foliage while someone reads over the casket and a brass band plays a lament. But the threnody take on a subtle, more lively lilt. Soon, some of the mourners are tapping their feet. Then a row of four or five dark figures begin bobbing slightly up and down to the tune, by Ennio Moriconne out of Nino Rota.

And that's nothing. An icy rain begins to fall. The mourners are quickly drenched and look as if they're about to freeze. And two more figures come literally dancing down the slope to drop a wreath on the coffin before dancing away. The wreath has the wrong name on it, but as it turns out, the cadaver was undercover and had two identities and whoever ordered the wreath got them mixed up. And so it goes.

Sometimes Schell takes the story seriously. There are several shooting deaths. (Only one of them is turned into a semi-joke.) Jacqueline Bissett has the role of the girl who belongs to three men, the evil and egotistical villain Robert Shaw, the corpse, and John Voight's ever-smiling policeman. I can't figure out just what it is that informs Bissett's beauty, what it is that brings her so close to feminine perfection. Certainly her eyes have something to do with it. They slant at an ideal dihedral and they're sometimes blue, sometimes the color of a light turmeric, and as we all know, the eyes are the windows of the occiput. She has a generous bosom but I discount that.

Martin Ritt is surprisingly effective as the worn-out, cynical, old cop. His features are over-sized, as are his black-rimmed glasses, and he has quadruple chins, smokes cigars, and his clothes are as shabby as his carefully cluttered apartment. Voight is good too, but then he always is.

As a murder mystery, this is pretty sloppy work. As a thing unto itself, it's not at all bad.

Madonna, it is always cold, foggy, and cloudy in Bern, hardly a healthy place to live. No wonder the commissioner is ill.