Les Diaboliques (1955) - film review

Christina and Michel Delasalle are a married couple who run a private boarding school in France.  Delasalle is a tyrant who bullies both his wife and his mistress, Nicole.  Having been violently assaulted by Delasalle, Nicole tells Christina that she can take no more and persuades her to assist in the murder of their tormentor.  The two women lure Delasalle back to Nicole’s lodgings where they drown him in a bath tub.  The two women then take the body back to the school in a basket and dump it in the swimming pool.   The following day, Delasalle’s body has not been found and, driven to distraction, his two killers order the pool to be drained.  To their horror, the body has disappeared.   When the suit that Delasalle was wearing when he was murdered is returned, dry-cleaned, Christina becomes increasingly paranoid.  Either her husband is still alive - which is impossible, as she saw him drowned - or else someone is playing a very cruel game...

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s follow-up to his masterful suspense thriller Le Salaire de la peur (1953) is an equally gripping thriller and his best known work, the deliciously devious Les Diaboliques.   Although Clouzot later became somewhat dismissive of the film and considered it a trivial crowd-pleaser rather than a serious piece of cinema art, it was to be his most commercially successful film and won him the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1954.  As in Clouzot’s previous film, Les Diaboliques starts out at a languorous pace  but it isn’t long before the tension is slowly ratcheted up, building to what is assuredly one of the most harrowing and unpredictable climaxes of any French film.  Even by today’s standards, the denouement of Les Diaboliques is shocking and memorable, a blood-chilling excursion into pure terror.  In stark contrast to the film’s lacklustre American remake Diabolique (1996), which starred Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani, this is a fiendish masterpiece of tortuous intrigue and audience manipulation, intermittently lightened by some unexpected jolts of black humour.

Les Diaboliques is based on the popular crime-thriller novel Celle qui n’était plus by the celebrated writing team Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (their first collaboration).  A groundbreaking film, it proved to be highly influential in the development of both the psycho-thriller of the 1960s and ’70s and the slasher movie of the 1980s.  Several important examples of the psycho genre - notably Seth Holt’s Taste of Fear (1961) (one of the finest films made by Hammer) - were a wholesale rip-off of Les Diaboliques, whilst others were content to take the basic concept of a vulnerable woman in danger and replay the film’s nerve-wracking final ten minutes ad nauseum.  Alfred Hitchcock was so impressed by the film that immediately after seeing it he bought to rights to Boileau and Narcejac’s novel Sueurs froides: d’entre les morts, which he later made into Vertigo (1958).  Hitchcock would also adopt Clouzot’s edict not to allow anyone into the theatre once the film’s projection had started for his subsequent film Psycho (1960), which is itself clearly influenced by (if not a direct homage to) Les Diaboliques.

As the principal villain of the piece, Simone Signoret gives a portrayal of female villainy that makes Lady Macbeth and Lucrezia Borgia look like the acme of feminine virtue.  In what was a complete contrast to her star-making femme fatale turn in Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or (1952), Signoret instantly and irreversibly transformed her screen persona with her chilling interpretation of the cold-hearted murderess Nicole Horner.  This is Signoret at her most compelling, butch and darkly sensual.  But whilst her character is thoroughly evil, there is sufficient humanity in her portrayal for us to sympathise with her.  By contrast, the other two diabolical members of this infernal trio - Christina and Michel (expertly played by Vera Clouzot and Paul Meurisse) - are considerably less sympathetic, the former because she is a weak hypocrite, the latter because he has no redeeming features at all.  Whereas Nicole is morally blind, a conscienceless lost soul for whom the taking of life has no deep moral significance, Christina is a devout Catholic who alone realises the enormity of her crime, and so she perhaps gets what she deserves.  Michel Delasalle is the worst of the three, a natural-born sadist who delights in tormenting those around him (even forcing his pupils to eat stale fish).   Surely his wife is justified in murdering him?  Even when he is so obviously dead, Michel continues to inflict misery on his victims...

And then there is the supremely creepy Commissaire Fichet, an unkempt police inspector (the original model for Lieutenant Columbo), who makes a habit of hanging about mortuaries so that he can presumably pick up a case and fulfil his role in life, that of the human limpet.  Played by the excellent Charles Vanel (who went to Hell and back in Clouzot’s previous Le Salaire de la peur), Inspector Fichet is probably the most unsettling character in Les Diaboliques, a man who appears from nowhere, has no background, and who is so shrouded in mystery that he might just as easily be an axe-wielding psychopath as an emissary from the Vatican. There is something doggedly sinister and yet darkly comedic in the way Fichet keeps cropping up in the latter half of the film, looking like a slightly over-earnest Yorkshire terrier with a stick in its mouth as he presents another clue that may or may not unravel the mystery of the missing corpse.

The wonderfully vile Signoret and Meurisse certainly have a nice line in twisted inhumanity and demonic venality, but it is Vanel who is the scariest thing on offer in Les Diaboliques - mainly because we haven’t the faintest idea who he is or what he is doing here.  In fact, there is scarcely a character in the film who isn’t at least slightly sinister.  The dilapidated old school which Meurisse runs as a down-market Japanese prisoner-of-war camp is staffed by teachers whose primary asset is to look suspiciously like a closet child killer.  The child pupils are also a pretty demonic little bunch who look like psychopaths and evil estate agents in the making (watch them carefully and you may catch a glimpse of a very young Johnny Halliday, making his screen debut under his real name Jean-Philippe Smet).  Perhaps the main reason why Les Diaboliques continues to shock is that it offers such a relentlessly grim assessment of human nature, as bleak perhaps as that seen in Clouzot’s earlier misanthropic masterpiece Le Corbeau (1943).  Those characters that are not obviously tainted by evil are just plain weird, the kind that are most at home in a Harold Pinter play or presenting children’s TV.  

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the complete absence of music (apart from during the opening and closing credits, a haunting piece composed by Georges Van Parys).  It is a popular belief these days that music is essential for building tension and creating atmosphere.  Les Diaboliques proves the contrary, that music can be completely superfluous and that it is possible to achieve the same result, arguably more effectively, through careful camerawork and editing.  Often the lack of music can be more atmospheric than its presence.  Indeed, it is the oppressive stillness, violently ruptured by unexpected sounds such as the tapping of a typewriter, that makes the film’s last ten minutes so utterly terrifying.

With its compelling performances, faultless mise-en-scène and a truly gruesome ending, Les Diaboliques deserves its reputation as a classic of French cinema and one of the greatest of all suspense-thrillers.  Despite the film’s shamelessly populist subject matter, Clouzot tackles it with the same artistic rigour as his more serious films, and in doing delivers his darkest and most cynical exploration of the worst in human nature.  The tragic irony is that his beloved wife Vera would die just a few years later, from a heart attack...

© James Travers 2000-2011

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