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Les Diaboliques
aka Diabolique
Screening: Monday #26 June, 6:30pm
France
1954
Director/Producer: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Production co: Filmsonor
Screenplay: Henri-Georges Clouzot, G. Geronimi. Based on the novel The Woman Who Was by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
Cinematography: Armand Thirard
Editor: Madeleine Gug
Sound: William Sivel
Music: Georges Van Parys
Nicole Horner: Simone Signoret
Christina Delasalle: Vera Clouzot
Michel Delasalle: Paul Meurisse
Insp Fichet: Charles Vanel
M Drain: Pierre Larquey
M Raymond: Michel Serrault
Plantiveau: Jean Brochard
Mme Herboux: Thrse Dorny
M Herboux: Noel Roquevert
Dr Loisy: Georges Chamarat
Soudieu: Georges Poujouly
In French with English subtitles
114 mins
B & W
35mm
ADMISSION STRICTLY MEMBERS ONLY
No amount of being dragged through the gutter quite prepares one for Les Diaboliques. You may know the title, for the story has been remade in English: on TV with Sam Waterston, Tuesday Weld and Joan Hackett; and for cinemas as Diabolique, with Chazz Palminteri, Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani. If you have seen either of those, you have seen nothing. The setting is a French boarding school where Paul Meurisse is the headmaster and a monster of cruelty. He has a wife (played by Vra Clouzot, the director's wife), who has a bad heart; and he has a mistress, played by Simone Signoret. This set-up is so consumed in loathing that everyone has a longing to kill everyone else, while the wife might be frightened to death. But what makes the film is the hideous school, the sense of damp, rot and poison everywhere-and the sheer incredulity that anyone would want to stay alive.
Les Diaboliques has many plot turns, and many unhealed scars in my mind. So I'd far rather not get into the odious swimming pool, let alone the bathroom. Just try it for yourself. Perhaps it has gone stale and obvious by now. I doubt it. Few things date more quickly than films meant to frighten us. But Les Diaboliques is a little along the lines of Psycho: it leaves you wanting to be clean again, yet redefines all our feelings about baths and showers. Clouzot usually did his own screenplays and, on Les Diaboliques, he worked from a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Ever alert to box office, Hitch noted the triumph of Les Diaboliques and checked on other things that duo had done. He found another novel, D'Entre les Morts, which became the basis for Vertigo. - David Thomson, The Guardian
The setting is a French provincial school for boys; the headmaster's wife and mistress conspire to murder him. It sounds simple, but the characters seem fearfully knowing, and there are undertones of strange, tainted pleasures and punishments. According to the director, Clouzot, 'I sought only to amuse myself and the little child who sleeps in all our hearts-the child who hides her head under the bedcovers and begs, "Daddy, Daddy, frighten me."' Clouzot does it, all right; his Grand Guignol techniques are so calculatedly grisly that they seem silly, yet they succeed in making one feel queasy and sordid and scared... - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies
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Presented with the generous support of the French Embassy
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