La Décade prodigieuse (1971)

La Décade prodigieuse is a French thriller film first released in 1971, directed by Claude Chabrol.  The film stars Anthony Perkins, Michel Piccoli, Marlène Jobert, Orson Welles and Guido Alberti.  It has also been released under the title: Ten Days Wonder.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


A young man, Charles, wakes up one morning in a hotel room, his hands stained with blood.   He has no recollection of the events of the past few days.   Half convinced he is going mad, he appeals to his former university professor, Paul Régis, to stay with him at his father’s country house and analyse his behaviour.   Charles’ father, Théo, is a domineering eccentric who insists that all his family dress in 1920s garb.  He is married to a young woman, Hélène, whom he adopted when she was a small girl.  Since childhood, Charles and Hélène have been close, but recently they have started to have an affair.  Disaster threatens when Charles’ love letters to Hélène are stolen and someone begins to blackmail the adulterous wife.  With no income of his own, Charles is compelled to steal money from his father to pay off the mysterious blackmailer.   When Paul finds himself implicated in the staged theft of Hélène’s jewels, he has no recourse but to betray Charles.  It is only after he has left this strange menagerie that Paul realises the truth.   Someone is about to be killed...

La Decade prodigieuse is not the most well-oiled of Claude Chabrol’s thrillers, and coming after such excellent examples of the genre as Le Boucher (1969) et Que la bête meure (1969), it is something of a let down.  Whilst the director succeeds in sustaining an aura of grim menace – for which the often weird cinematography is largely responsible - inept plotting, poor editing and weak dialogue make this a painfully stilted work.  Even the combined talents of four great actors cannot breach the stifling envelope of complacency that shrouds this film, although casting Anthony Perkins (a.k.a. Norman Bates) in the role of yet another (presumed) psychopath and Awesome Welles as an all-knowing patriarch is hardly likely to have won Chabrol many awards for original thinking. 

The denouement to the story is rather ingenious, but the pay off is greatly diminished by the faltering narrative that precedes it and a shameless lack of depth in the characterisation (Marlène Joberts’ character is so two dimensional that the actress could have been replaced by a full-size cardboard cut-out without anyone noticing).  Chabrol was himself dissatisfied with this film, citing as one of the reasons for its failure the fact that, for commercial reasons, the film had to be made in English.   This would account for the ropey dialogue – which is even worse in the badly dubbed French version.  Mr Welles’ insistence on wearing a fake green nose doesn’t help matters either...

© James Travers 2005

This is one of Chabrol’s most controversial films – a ’theological thriller,’ as Time Out/London says. Based on a corny Ellery Queen tale in which the villain (Orson Welles) breaks all the Commandments, Chabrol has fashioned it into a stylish Fritz Langian confrontation with Fate. The Wellesian killer chooses to play God and create his own world. The high-brow UK filmzine, Sight & Sound, calls it, ’teasingly brilliant... more Nietzschean than Hitchcock.’ It runs the gamut, ’from Genesis to the Apocalypse.’ Agreeing with Time Out (’worth seeing again and again’) US critic Rex Reed applauds, ’Extraordinary..elegant thriller.’ 3 stars.

© Peter Garvey, La Jolla, CA 2008

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