Flick of The Day: Les Diaboliques / The Devils

A few weeks back we looked at Henri-Georges Clouzot's work, The Wages of Fear, noting his reputation as the French Hitchcock. Today's flick of the day is perhaps his masterpiece, Les Diaboliques, a devilish psychological thriller set in a boarding school. 

Diabolique (The Criterion Collection) Spine #35)

In a provincial boarding school run by the brutish Michel Delassalle played by Paul Meurisse, his long suffering wife Christina and his equally downtrodden mistress Nicole are plotting murder. Though Christina owns the boarding school of which he is headmaster, she has been beaten down by years of abuse and suffers from a weak heart. Together they draw up a plan to get rid of him over a holiday weekend. Christina runs away with Nicole to her country home and telephones Michel to demand a divorce. Michel pursues the pair and when he arrives, Christina drugs him with tainted whiskey and together they drown him in a bathtub. Hiding the body in a wicker basket, they return to the school late at night and dump Michel into the murky depths of the pool. Of course, like all best laid plans, something goes wrong. A series of events point to Michel being very much alive and when they drain the pool, his body is nowhere to be found.  Is he alive or dead? Christina can not handle the guilt and with her heart troubling her takes to her bed. However all is not as it seems and Les Diaboliques has one of the great twist endings of all time.

This is a real gem of a film and Clouzot successfully builds the tension as the plot unfolds and Christina's mind begins to unravel. He does this by creating a chilling atmosphere in the school, with pupils swearing they saw the missing headmaster and lots of atmospheric dark corners with doors opening unbidden in the night. All very much the kind of tactics used in your average horror film. This leads the audience to begin to question what they are seeing, much like Christina. Until the last frame, you are unsure as to Michel's ultimate fate and that is a remarkable achievement. There is also some some excellent symbolic imagery. When a guilty Christina hires a retired detective to investigate Michel's disappearance, there is a scene where they talk in the bedroom partitioned by bars much like a murder suspect behind bars.

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this film with its plot lines and twists turning up in various forms in numerous thrillers down through the years. Indeed the film itself has been remade three times including a truly dire Sharon Stone vehicle from the '90s remarkable only for abandoning Clouzot's ending and reproducing the rest of the film shot for shot. I suppose it has always been thus in Hollywood.

Christina Delassalle: So it's a coincidence? 

Nicole Horner: A coincidence, yes. 

Christina Delassalle: And Fichet. Was his being at the morgue a coincidence? And the suit. And the hotel. And now the children! Is it a coincidence that it's getting closer and closer?

A great film which any self-respecting thriller fan has to see, it has become a touchstone for the genre since its release in 1955. Perhaps Clouzot's best work alongside The Wages of Fear, it marked  him as director par excellence. The film still feels fresh today with its plot riddled with turns, sexual intrigue and a story that any audience can find compelling and believable.

Flick of The Day: The Wages of Fear / Le Salaire de la peur

After a decade as a screenwriter, Henri-Georges Clouzot rose to great acclaim as the "French Hitchcock" in the 1940's and 50's. If anything however, his ability to turn the screw in a taut thriller exceeded even the master himself. With film's such as Diabolique and today's flick of the day, The Wages of Fear, Clouzot established himself internationally as a director of thrillers par excellence. 

The Wages of Fear - Criterion Collection

The film's plot centres on a small group of men who are stuck in a small town in South America for various reasons, a lack of funds being a central theme. The town is a desolate strip in the middle of a barren desert, its only real link to the outside world a small airport. The men cannot afford the airfare and don't have any documents if they could. They are stateless workers, lost in the desert. The only opportunity for employment in the town is to work for an American oil company, SOC who control the town, paying workers a pittance and taking the law into its own hands if necessary. The first half of the film examines the men's daily struggles, largely taking place in the cantina where they spend their days. The four main protagonists are Mario, a Corsican and Jo a fellow Frenchman who together bond over their love of Paris. There is also Bimba, a quiet intense Dutchman and Luigi, a happy go lucky Italian with a strong work ethic. Before long, news reaches the town of a massive fire at one of the oil wells in the desert. The only way to put the fire out is to use nitroglycerine, itself highly explosive. SOC needs four men to transport it across the decidedly treacherous roads as it is considered too dangerous for their employees. Lured by the offer of $2,000 per man, the stateless souls fight to take on the job. So the four men set off into the wilderness. Two trucks packed with nitroglycerine. As the miles pass, the tension mounts, with each twist and turn they risk certain debt.

The film is worth seeing for the extended transport sequence alone. It is so tense, you sit on the edge of your seat, awaiting an explosion to take them all away. Clouzot has filled in the audience on the background of each of the characters, and why they are in the desert, meaning there is a genuine interest in their fate. It is one of the great sequences in cinema. 

"When I was a kid, I used to see men go off on this kind of jobs... and not come back. When they did, they were wrecks. Their hair had turned white and their hands were shaking like palsy! You don't know what fear is. But you'll see. It's catching, it's catching like small pox! And once you get it, it's for life! So long, boys, and good luck."

The oil company are portrayed as the worst kind of American imperialists and this led to a number of scenes being cut from the American release after accusations of anti-Americanism. Something not unfamiliar to Gaullist France. The American's are anti-union and only hire the "bums" as "those bums don't have any union, nor any families. And if they blow up, nobody'll come around bothering me for any contribution".

The film was remade in 1977 by the New-Hollywood wunderkind, William Friedkin, as Sorcerer. The film was a flop for one very obvious reason, it's rather glaringly inappropriate title. Fans of Friedkin's The Exorcist were undoubtedly disappointed not to find a single Sorcerer on display. The original is by far the better of the two film's, anchored by a fine performance from Yves Montand. Is there anybody more quintessentially French then Yves Montand?

One of the best film's to come out of France in the 1950's and possibly Clouzot's best work, it sets the scene with its opening half before heading for a thrilling finale. It is well worth a look.