DIABOLIQUE Movie Review

Les Diabolique

It's as great as it's cracked up to be, but perhaps for different reasons than you've heard. Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 thriller is the story of a monstrous, philandering schoolteacher (Paul Meurisse) whose wife (Vera Clouzot) and lover (Simone Signoret) get together to do him in. Diabolique was originally promoted and described as a shocker, and though there are certainly a few pleasurable jolts left in the gas tank, today's Freddy Krueger—raised audiences are a bit harder to stun with unexpected twists. Fortunately for Clouzot—and us—this darkly funny and sexually suggestive fun house offers considerably more than a stunner of an ending (though it does happen to have one). The bickering, jealousy, and fear that bonds weak, victimized wife Clouzot to tough-as-nails mistress/murderess Signoret boils over when their victim's body vanishes; they seem to suspect each other and are driven nearly to the breaking point by the casual but insistent questioning of the wiser-than-he-seems, raincoated Inspector Fichet (Charles Vanel). The audience isn't sure what—or who—to believe, but since all of those involved in the crime are such monsters, the whole picture has a misanthropic, deeply perverse atmosphere unlike any other thriller I know. It's fun, all right, but you might want to go to confession afterward. (Remade clumsily and pointlessly in 1996; the casting of Isabelle Adjani and Sharon Stone was clever but to no avail.) From a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who went on to write the story that would form the basis of Hitchcock's Vertigo.

NEXT STOP… The Wages of Fear, Vertigo, Psycho

1955 107m/B FR Simone Signoret, Vera Clouzot, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel, Michel Serrault; D: Henri-Georges Clouzot; W: Frederic Grendel, Jerome Geronimi, Rene Masson; C: Armand Thirard; M: Georges Van Parys. New York Film Critics Awards '55: Best Foreign Film. VHS, LV, 8mm VYY, NOS, SNC