Film: Les Diaboliques
Year of production: 1955
UK Release date: 25th April 2011
Distributor: Arrow
Certificate: 12
Running time: 114 mins
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Starring: Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel, Jean Brochard
Genre: Crime/Drama/Horror/Mystery/Thriller
Format: DVD
Country of Production: France
Language: French
Newly BFI restored, Les Diaboliques is based on a book by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac that Hitchcock tried, and failed, to option first. Clouzot’s film, techniques and tropes have been used and re-used so many times it could almost be a ‘best-of’ mystery/thriller show reel were it not for the fact that it came first nigh-on sixty years ago.
Michel (Paul Meurisse) is the headmaster of a boys’ boarding school owned by his wife Christina (Véra Clouzot). Michel rules the roost with an iron fist, causing Christina and his mistress Nicole (Simone Signoret), also a teacher, to plot murder together.
Luring him to Nicole’s house, they drug and drown him in the bathtub, returning the body to the school to deposit in the filthy swimming pool, thereby making it seem like an accident and giving them an alibi.
Conspiring to have the pool drained when Michel’s disappearance is noticed, they find the body has disappeared. Utterly adrift in a nightmare of their own making, they slowly begin to question their own sanity…
There is an old adage that you should never meet your heroes for they can never live up to your expectations - you’ll be left disappointed and disillusioned. The same argument can be applied to classic films whose names, plots and reputation are incredibly familiar, even if you’ve never got round to seeing the actual movie. How could that first viewing possibly rise to the stellar heights built up in your own head? Les Diaboliques can and does, and rewards even after multiple viewings. It also happens to be an excellent forensic wander into the DNA of virtually any and every thriller that has come since. You want to know one of the main reasons Hitchcock made Psycho and set the main, now infamous, scene in the shower? It’s because of the bathtub scenes in Les Diaboliques and his failure to get the rights to the Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac novel. You want to know why he later made Vertigo? It’s because, still smarting, he bought the rights to another Boileau-Narcejac novel (D’entre les morts) that formed the basis of the famous Jimmy Stewart starrer. Perhaps you’re a fan of M. Night Shyamalan’s unique blend of taught bluffs and double bluffs (well, at least his earlier output)? The man was simply following in the very well tread footsteps laid down here. Perhaps most intriguingly, perennial Peter Falk detective Columbo was born here; the creators of that famously crumpled detective simply took the character of Alfred Fichet, played by Charles Vanet, and made him American (if Inspector Fichet had uttered “just one more thing” in Les Diaboliques, it would have seemed quite natural).
All of this would merely be an interesting little history lesson for an old style, old fashioned black & white flick made in the 1950s were it not for the fact that Les Diaboliques still holds the power to enthral, chill and shock. Clouzot moves through and blends together genres that, on paper, you wouldn’t think could work together. It opens as a melodrama involving the ménage à trois of Michel, Christina and Nicole, before moving on to film noir, as the ladies plot and execute murder. After that, we’re into psychological thriller territory before landing firmly in horror. That these disparate styles are married so effortlessly, so seamlessly, is nothing short of miraculous. It’s sometimes tried today, particularly in Hollywood, and the clunking mess that always results can make you think that you’ve experienced some amateur, YouTube mash-up. Here, it’s just wonderful. It may also come as a surprise that Les Diaboliques can still shock and send shivers down the spine. The ending in particular, justly famous, is a lesson in restrained scares that can still make you jump, and whilst creaking doors, dark corners and visceral shocks are so par for the course these days as to be boring, Les Diaboliques is anything but.
Clouzot gained a reputation as the French Hitchcock, but it’s one forged on this film and this film alone. He was not against using what were, to some, low-rent tricks to get publicity for Les Diaboliques, such as refusing late comers into theatres and urging viewers, right before the end title sequence, not to tell their friends the ending. Interestingly, and far more famously, Hitchcock used both gimmicks on Psycho five years later. Perhaps we should have been referring to Hitchcock as the American Couzot all these years?
A masterclass in storytelling, twists and chills, Les Diabolique has lost none of its power in the preceding fifty-plus years. Atmospheric, scary and shocking, it’s the father of modern, twisty thrillers. JMB
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