Legend has it Jim Morrison became obsessed with Rider on the Rain after seeing it repeatedly, with “Riders on the Storm” following not long afterward. Whether the story has grown in the telling is another matter, but the connection certainly sounds right. Few movies seem more comfortable with rain, unease and the feeling that something terrible is hanging just outside the frame.

It also offers a very different Charles Bronson from the one American audiences would soon know best. By 1970 he was already a much bigger star in Europe than at home, building on the success of films like Farewell, Friend. Here there’s no vigilante mission, no arsenal and very little interest in letting Bronson solve problems with his fists.

On a gray, rainy day, a stranger arrives in a sleepy seaside town in the South of France. That night, Mellie (Marlène Jobert, Last Known Address) is attacked in her home by a masked intruder. She kills him in self-defense and panics, dumping his body over a cliff into the sea rather than telling anyone what happened.

She doesn’t even confide in her husband (Gabriele Tinti, Death Occurred Last Night), an airline pilot who is rarely home. Then Harry Dobbs (Bronson, Death Wish) arrives. He’s American, persistent and far too interested in Mellie. Worse, he seems to know exactly what she did.

Director René Clément, who made Forbidden Games, works from a screenplay by Sébastien Japrisot and keeps shifting the movie underneath us. The attack itself is blunt and ugly, but what follows gradually becomes stranger. Dobbs can sound threatening in one scene and almost flirtatious in the next, until the film begins resembling a warped courtship built around interrogation, suspicion and a body nobody wants to talk about.

It has the logic of noir and the mood of a dream you can’t quite wake yourself from. Jobert carries much of it, initially seeming fragile before revealing just how quickly Mellie can think when cornered. Bronson meets her on completely different terrain than usual. This is Bronson the riddle, not Bronson the fist. His stillness becomes part of the game because you’re never entirely sure whether Dobbs is protecting Mellie, tormenting her or doing some peculiar combination of both.

Jill Ireland (The Mechanic), Bronson’s wife off screen, turns up in support, while Francis Lai (Love Story) supplies a score that helps keep the whole thing suspended somewhere between thriller and reverie.

Not everything has aged as gracefully. The middle stretch can idle, and the film’s 1970 attitude toward Mellie’s assault can be difficult to sit with now. Anyone arriving for the harder Bronson of Death Wish will also spend a very long time waiting for him to start behaving like that guy.

That’s part of what makes Rider on the Rain worth seeing. Bronson rarely got opportunities this odd or playful once Hollywood decided exactly what kind of Charles Bronson movie audiences wanted. Here he gets to be unsettling, funny, charming and impossible to read, sometimes within the same conversation.