Le Trio infernal (1974)

Le Trio infernal is a French comedy horror film first released in 1974, directed by Francis Girod.  The film is based on a novel by Solange Fasquelle and stars Michel Piccoli, Romy Schneider, Mascha Gonska, Philippe Brizard and Jean Rigaux.  It has also been released under the title: The Infernal Trio.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Marseilles, 1919.  Georges Sarret is a distinguished and respected lawyer, recently honoured for his services in the First World War.   He takes as his lover Philomène Schmidt, a young German woman, who has just lost her job and home.  To enable Philomène to remain in France, Georges finds her a husband – who dies conveniently of natural causes a month after the wedding.  Georges repeats the trick with Philomène’s sister, Catherine – marrying her off to an old man who dies suddenly so that the scheming trio can profit from his life insurance.  When an accomplice in the scheme, Marcel Chambon, threatens to blackmail them, Georges and his two lovers have no option but to kill him and his mistress.  Having dissolved the bodies in sulphuric acid, Georges hires another man to pose as Chambon so that he can secure his assets.  Flush with the success of this venture, Georges proposes his most ambitious scam: he will insure Catherine’s life with five separate insurance companies; a young orphan woman who is dying from tuberculosis will provide Catherine’s death certificate when the moment comes.  Unfortunately, the scheme does not go quite as planned...

Le Trio infernal marked an auspicious directorial debut for Francis Girod and proved to be one of the most controversial French films of the 1970s.  An outlandish yet supremely stylish black comedy, it provoked a fierce reaction in the French press, with some commentators almost spitting blood in moral outrage at the film’s apparent depravity.  The fact that the film featured two of French cinema’s most high-profile actors of the time, Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider, merely fuelled the controversy.  The film’s notoriety stemmed largely from its most shocking sequence - the one in which the main protagonists dispose of two naked bodes in a bath of acid.  With few, if any, concessions to good taste, Girod goes so far as to show the bodies at their various stages of decomposition and follows this up with a protracted piece of farce in which the killers empty the gory contents of the baths with a soup ladle and bucket.   Not what you might call cosy family viewing. 

Fantastic as it may seem, Le Trio infernal is not a work of fiction but is in fact closely based on a real-life case.  In 1934, Georges Sarret was guillotined for his litany of crimes, protesting his innocence (in spite of some incontrovertible evidence against him) right up to the very end.  The film spares us this grim final chapter in Sarret’s life and instead concludes with a tongue-in-cheek happy ending.  If, as some would have us believe, marriage is the closest thing to Hell on Earth, then perhaps Sarret does get his just deserts in the end.  (Just imagine all those fun evenings when his wife runs a bath for him.)

One of the things which most shocked cinema audiences at that time was the spectacle of Romy Schneider playing a nymphomaniac murderess. For several years, the actress had struggled to rid herself of her association with the role of Sissi (Elisabeth of Bavaria), a sugar-sweet character she had played in a series of films in the 1950s.  It is reported that Schneider’s primary motivation for appearing in Le Trio infernal was to lay to rest her Sissi persona so that she would be free to move on and extend her repertoire.  If this is the case, she certainly succeeded.  Schneider’s portrayal of the amoral killer Philomène is one of her darkest and most brilliant creations, not merely a monster, but a tragic and complex character whose perverse acts are the product of intense personal traumas.

If Romy Schneider is the Devil’s handmaiden in this film, then her co-star Michel Piccoli is the Devil himself.  In one of his most outrageous - and, it must be said, entertaining - performances, Piccoli relishes every moment of his character’s macabre exploits and emerges as the very personification of evil.  The actor’s seductive charms have rarely been used to such diabolic ends; this is a performance to savour.  Piccoli inhabits the part of the villainous Georges Sarret so thoroughly and so convincingly that he chills the blood in virtually every scene, to the extent that he could give most of cinema’s other great horror icons a pretty good run for their money.  Le Trio infernal is pretty sick, but we should not lose sight of the fact that what it depicts is a stratum of society (the French bourgeoisie immediately after WWI) that is mired in its own sickening decadence and moral vacuity.  If the film shocks us, then we probably deserve to be shocked.

© James Travers 2005-2010

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