 | Clouzot has been endlessly accused of cruelly manipulating both his characters and audience and with Les Diabolques – a work of audacious trickery - he entirely reinvented the rules for mystery cinema. |
Director Henri-Georges Clouzot was a pivotal and divisive figure of Forties and Fifties French cinema, often referred to as ‘the French Hitchcock’ as he dealt in misanthropic, black-humoured tales of greed, jealousy, murder, immorality, and revenge.
He certainly gave the Master of Suspense a run for his money. Les Diaboliques has one of the most famous and influential twist endings ever, and the film was a huge commercial success, something unprecedented for a foreign-language film at that time. It had a memorable ad campaign stressing refusal to the theatre of anyone turning up late and urged viewers not to give away the ending, something that Hitchcock would later emulate for Psycho (1960).
The film takes its time to establish the characters, seemingly at the expense of plot, but we are in the hands of a master and everything is there for a reason. Atmospherically, there is an overwhelming air of decay, symbolised by the overgrown weeds clogging the pool, and the extraordinarily Byzantine architecture of the school itself.
Containing all his characteristic elements, the microcosm of the school, the dispassionate view of the murder plot and the twist in the tail, this is probably the apex of Clouzot’s career, with everything working as a symbiotic whole. Clouzot has been endlessly accused of cruelly manipulating both his characters and audience and with Les Diabolques – a work of audacious trickery - he entirely reinvented the rules for mystery cinema.
He certainly gave the Master of Suspense a run for his money. Les Diaboliques has one of the most famous and influential twist endings ever, and the film was a huge commercial success, something unprecedented for a foreign-language film at that time. It had a memorable ad campaign stressing refusal to the theatre of anyone turning up late and urged viewers not to give away the ending, something that Hitchcock would later emulate for Psycho (1960).
The film takes its time to establish the characters, seemingly at the expense of plot, but we are in the hands of a master and everything is there for a reason. Atmospherically, there is an overwhelming air of decay, symbolised by the overgrown weeds clogging the pool, and the extraordinarily Byzantine architecture of the school itself.
Containing all his characteristic elements, the microcosm of the school, the dispassionate view of the murder plot and the twist in the tail, this is probably the apex of Clouzot’s career, with everything working as a symbiotic whole. Clouzot has been endlessly accused of cruelly manipulating both his characters and audience and with Les Diabolques – a work of audacious trickery - he entirely reinvented the rules for mystery cinema.
