Diabolique

Diabolique

Legend has it that French director Henri-Georges Clouzot and Hollywood's master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, both vied for the rights to the Boileau-Narcejac novel on which the movie Diabolique (1955) was ultimately based. It's said that Clouzot won the rights to this mystery thriller by only a few hours. The sale launched the film careers of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, so perhaps as recompense the authors sold one of their next novels, D'entre les morts, to Hitchcock, who remade it as Vertigo in 1958. It makes sense that these two directors would scramble for the same material. Hitchcock and Clouzot are often mentioned by film historians in the same breath as the era's two top craftsmen of mystery and suspense movies. Although an interesting study could be made from a comparison between the two directors' films of the postwar years, it is Hitchcock who has gained the greater international renown. (By the late Fifties, Clouzot's films were being loudly condemned by the young Turks of the burgeoning French New Wave as the very type of studied, classical filmmaking they were rebelling against. Clouzot's reputation had also been permanently impugned by the two-year ban from filmmaking imposed on him from 1945 to 1947 for having directed films during the war that were financed by German money.)

Diabolique's study of murder and deception is masterfully controlled by Clouzot, who doles out information and builds sympathies only to savage our expectations during a couple of key moments (one of them being the twist ending). As the movie begins, a loathsome man's wife, Christina (played by Véra Clouzot, the director's wife), and his mistress, Nicole (Simone Signoret, in her international breakthrough), plot his imminent murder. Christina is frail, sickly, and brunette; Nicole is tough, unknowable, and blond. Clouzot's black-and-white images are marvelously crafted, utilizing compositions and the movements of characters through confined spaces to convey the story. Among other things, a frightening bathtub set-piece and the surprise ending will make you reconsider Hitchcock's originality in 1959's Psycho. Criterion has packaged Diabolique with the company's characteristic diligence, and the disc's accompanying onscreen features and printed essays add greatly to a wider appreciation of the film.