Les Diaboliques

 I've been showing a series of films at Belfast's The Harrison hotel. The common factor between them is that they are all films I really like. Beyond that there's no theme as such, though odd commonalities and strange threads are ultimately thrown up: last night's film Les Diaboliques was a huge influence on Hitchcock. Sisters, by Brian De Palma, and which is the next film in the series, is massively influence by Hitchcock. Margot Kidder is in Sisters. She's also in the last film in the series Black Christmas. And on and on it goes, the coincidences tumbling out like drunks from a clown car. 

Last night's was Les Diaboliques. Here are a few scant notes I made about it. 

Les Diaboliques

1955

Dir: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Starring: Simone Signoret as Nicole

 Vera Clouzot as Christina

Paul Meurisse as Michel

 

Based on 1952 novel She Who Was No More by Boileau and Narcejac, who also wrote The Living and the Dead, which Hitchcock turned into Vertigo. They would also work on the screenplay of Eyes Without a Face, another film in this series. I think that’s November’s treat.

Clouzot has Simone Signoret’s character live in Niort, which was his hometown. Rather like me placing my murder in a tin bath in Basingstoke.

The film was remade in 1996 as “Diabolique”, starring Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani. Which I think I saw at the time and may have been one of the only people to do so. They changed the ending to make it more palatable to an American audience. So, yeah, they ruined it. It’s quite spectacularly poor.

Vera Clouzot made only three films: Le Salaire de la Peur, Les Diaboliques and Les Espions, all three were directed by her husband, made by the production company he named after her, Vera Films. She would be dead of a heart attack five years after making Les Diaboliques. Clouzot went into a deep depression and moved to Tahiti, which I imagine is a pretty good place to be depressed.

Simone Signoret, who shares a birthday with me, different years, is a goddess of French cinema. She’s perfect here a Nicole: tough, sophisticated, physically strong, the opposite of poor Christina.

This is a film that Hitchcock wanted to make but he was cock-blocked by Clouzot. Psycho was Hitchcock’s response to Les Diaboliques, sharing its bleakness, its black and whiteness, its plug holes, its early exits. The writer of Psycho, Robert Bloch, has said Les Diaboliques is his favourite film. I think I detect an echo of Les Diaboliques’ nastiness in Hitchcock’s 1970 film “Frenzy”. It’s very grimy, its characters are all low rent, no one is kind, everyone has an angle. In Les Diaboliques there’s a hamper with a dead body in the back of a van, in Frenzy it’s a potato sack full of Anna Massey in the back of the Bedford.

Les Diaboliques is the Velvet Underground of suspense pictures. Every writer, director and producer who saw it wanted to make their version. Hammer’s Jimmy Sangster made about five of them, the best of which is 1961’s Taste of Fear.

This is a cruel film. A cold film. It’s also, potentially, a ghost story. It’s certainly a film torn from the heart of the toxic 20^th Century. Made only ten years after the end of the second world war, the France depicted is run down, broken and numb. The school setting is a ruin, the children feral, the teachers drunks and nudists. At the centre of this story is a unique menage a trois: Michel the headmaster, his wife Christina, whose money pays for the school, and Nicole, also a teacher, and Michel’s mistress. He mistreats both wife and mistress badly, he is callous and violent, and he starves the children in his charge. He drives wife and mistress together in a deadly pact.

Michel is like a manifestation of the desolation of war. He’s like its shadow. He brings violence and privation. When he’s not around the school lessons are better, the weather better, the food better, the children well behaved. He is poison. When the women plot against him, you look the other way. The women are surrounded by men: the monstrous thuggish children, the snide schoolmasters, an assortment of pissed soldiers and obsessives in berets, and above all Michel, haunting the rotting school, taking pleasure in his cruelty, demanding it as a right. The sisterhood is making a stand. They are united and fighting back. This is justice.

Until it isn’t.

Until it all goes wrong.