Les Louves (1957)
Directed by Luis Saslavsky

Film Review

Such was the immense success of H.G. Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955) that the writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac suddenly found themselves in great demand by film directors and producers keen to exploit their talents in the psychological suspense genre.  Before Alfred Hitchcock embarked on his stunning adaptation of the duo's thriller novel D'entre les morts (retitled Vertigo for the film), Boileau and Narcejac worked on the screenplay to adapt another of their books, Les Louves.  Director Georges Franju would subsequently make use of their writing abilities on Les Yeux sans visage (1960) and Pleins feux sur l'assassin (1961), with over a dozen other screen adaptations following in later years.

Les Diaboliques and Vertigo set a very high benchmark against which other Boileau-Narcejac adaptations are, perhaps unfairly, measured.  Released just two years after Clouzot's spine-chilling masterpiece, Les Louves (a.k.a. Demoniac) is a respectable suspense thriller in its own right, but made on a smaller budget and by a less gifted director, it is clearly a lesser work, its impact somewhat diminished by a plot that feels painfully contrived and a plethora of poorly defined secondary characters that pop in and out of the narrative with no other function than to ratchet up the tension.  The script feels needlessly repetitive in places and you can't help feeling the film needed some judicious pruning to achieve its full nerve-racking impact.

Les Louves is the most memorable of the half a dozen or so films directed by the Argentinean Luis Saslavsky during his decade-long exile in France in the 1950s.  After this, Saslavsky collaborated with Yves Montand on Premier mai (1958), a tame social comedy with a neo-realist sheen that now appears hopelessly dated compared with most of his other work.  By contrast, Les Louves is a much slicker production that has aged well, its modest production values masked by some highly atmospheric lighting and deft camerawork which effectively sustain the ever-increasing tension, assisted by a particularly anxiety-inducing score from Joseph Kosma.

That the film holds the attention as well as it does in spite of a fairly mediocre script is entirely down to the performances from the three lead actors - an extraordinary trio consisting of François Périer, Micheline Presle and Jeanne Moreau.  François Périer's penchant for playing complex neurotic characters had already been demonstrated in numerous films in the 1940s and early '50s - highlights include Christian-Jaque's Un revenant (1946) and Gilles Grangier's Au p'tit zouave (1949).  In Les Louves, the actor is at his best as the fugitive impostor who, desperate to begin a new life, ends up being caught in a particularly nasty game of feminine intrigue.  Gervais's inability to escape (suitably mirrored by the ultimate fate of his chief tormenter) makes him such a sympathetic character that, like him, we can barely stand the tension of his being exposed as a fraud by his entourage of self-interested plotters.

The film's title - which translates as She-Wolves - turns out to be a highly appropriate one.  Excepting the old crone who offers help to the escaped prisoners at the start of the film, none of the female characters in the film has much in the way of compassion and sympathy, and one is evil personified (although it takes a while before the extent of her cruel venality becomes apparent to us).  In a role that has an eerie resonance with the character she would later play for François Truffaut in Jules et Jim (1962), Jeanne Moreau confirms herself as one of the leading French actresses of her day.  Her portrayal of the more overtly unhinged of the two sisters is as unsettling as it is moving, and right up until her shocking sudden ejection from the narrative she remains a dark and fascinating enigma, so hauntingly prescient of the rich gallery of femme fatales the actress would go on to to play in later years.

Micheline Presle has a much more challenging job with her far more ambiguous character Hélène.  (It is interesting that the name Hélène recurs so often in the oeuvre of thriller director Claude Chabrol - could he perhaps be using Presle's protagonist as a model of tactful duplicity?)  At the time, Presle would have been more strongly associated with honourable romantic types, seldom called upon to play the archetypal 'bad woman'.  The closest she got to public censure was for her portrayal of a youth-corrupting nurse in Claude Autant-Lara's Le Diable au corps (1947).  In Les Louves, Presle gets to inhabit the role of an outright fiend in human form for the first time in her career, and in doing so she turns in one of her greatest screen performances.

So objectionable are the other female characters - most notably the vile opportunist portrayed with sickening realism by Madeleine Robinson - that it is only in the last third of the film that we even begin to suspect Hélène of being capable of malevolent self-interest.  For the bulk of the film, Gervais's anxieties about his fiancée's motives strike us more like guilt-fuelled paranoia than well-founded fears, particularly when the film appears to be heading down the same road as Hitchcock's deceptively similar Suspicion (1941).  We have to wait for the very last minute of the film to appreciate the extent of Hélène's calculating depravity, but even then we are more shocked by the nature of her well-deserved punishment than by her moral failings.  Les Louves may not be an unqualified masterpiece, but thanks to its utterly compelling lead performances it is just as gripping as Clouzot's more meticulously crafted thriller, and even more depressingly bleak in its assessment of human nature.

Film Synopsis

During the Second World War, two Frenchmen - Gervais Larauch and Bernard Pradalié - escape from the German prisoner-of-war camp where they are being detained and head back to France.  On the way, Bernard is accidentally killed by a passing train, leaving Gervais to continue his journey alone.  Known for having murdered his wife, Gervais is keen to start a new life, so he takes advantage of his friend's death to steal his identity.  On his arrival in Lyon, he calls on Hélène Vanaux, a young woman who corresponded with Bernard during his time in the prison camp and who agreed to marry him once he had regained his liberty.  Since she has fallen on hard times after her father's death, Hélène must earn money by giving piano lessons.

Naturally, Hélène has no reason to suspect that Gervais is not the man she is engaged to, but Bernard's fear that his deception may be uncovered is aggravated by the strange behaviour of Hélène's sister Agnès.  Since she attempted suicide five years previously, Agnès has been showing signs of mental derangement, evidenced by her attendance at nocturnal gatherings where she passes herself off as a fortune teller.  Gervais finds himself drawn to the moody young woman, and she appears to be madly in love with him.  Tensions between the fugitive and his two hosts are further heightened when Bernard's sister Julia shows up unexpectedly and positively identifies Gervais as her brother.

It seems that Bernard is the sole beneficiary of a vast fortune left to him by his rich uncle.  By supporting Gervais's claim to be Bertrand, Julia hopes that he will reward her with a large share of his windfall.  The plan comes to nothing, since, a short while later, Julia is gunned down by a German patrol after a resistance strike.  It isn't long after this that Agnès also dies, apparently having succeeded in poisoning herself.  Hélène and Gervais then take up residence at a remote house in the country, but even here Gervais's secret is not safe.

Before she died, Julia communicated her suspicions to another man, André Vilsan, who calls on Hélène and tries to convince her that Gervais is an impostor who killed Bernard for his money.  Overhearing the conversation, Gervais becomes convinced that Hélène knows his secret and intends murdering him so that she can claim the whole of Bertrand's inheritance.  By the time he realises that he is being poisoned, Gervais is too weak to escape.  His last act before he dies is to lock Hélène in a cupboard from which she will never be able to escape.