ODE TO FRENCH FILMMAKER HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT by Craig Hammill

Tonight we screen famed French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot’s horror suspense thriller LES DIABOLIQUES (1955). The legend goes (and it very well may be fact) that Clouzot had beaten none other than Alfred Hitchcock by mere hours to option the source novel and the resulting masterpiece so infuriated Hitchcock (because it was as brilliant as Hitchcock knew it would be) that Sir Alfred immediately optioned the novelists Boileau-Narcejac’s D’Entre Les Morts which became Vertigo.

So in that weird cosmic way that never quite makes sense to us mere mortals, we owe Les Diaboliques thanks for Hitchcock’s hypnotic masterpiece.

But that’s truly just a great side story because Henri-Georges Clouzot’s amazing, inspiring, always head of the cinematic experimental line body of work speaks for itself.

This piece is humble supplication to you, dear movie lover, to check out as many of his movies as you can as soon as possible. You will discover a body of work as rich and nourishing as discovering a dark cool underground spring from which you draw and build a well.

Clouzot was not just a master of suspense (though he was that) but also (like Hitchcock) committed to always trying new techniques, new ways to tell a story, new styles. Each of his great movies are distinct from the others in fascinating ways.

His two World War II adjacent movies Le Courbeau (miraculously made during the German occupation in 1943) and Quai Des Orfevres traffic in noir, atmosphere, and character development. Le Courbeau tells the still stunningly important story of a doctor in a small provincial French town who becomes the target of an anonymous poison pen campaign accusing him of affairs and abortion. This expose into gossip and communal complicity intent on destroying an innocent individual on rumor alone is miraculous because it’s a clear metaphor of French complicity during the Vichy government but more importantly a timeless tale of how we humans seem always ready to accept gossip, rumor, unsubstantiated wild claims if they’re salacious enough without doing the hard work of double checking the facts.

Quai Des Orfevres very much takes its place in the pantheon of great infidelity noirs like Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, La Chienne, and Ace in the Hole just to name a few as it tells the story of a jealous husband who goes to murder his wife’s older lover only to find the adulterer dead already. Quai is a masterclass in the kind of nighttime French music hall and back room noir that would blossom to full bloom in the 1950’s with pictures like Becker’s Touchez Pas Au Grisbi and Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur.

Clouzot always seemed ahead of his time, like a prescient doctor who had his finger on the pulse of the generation to come, not the current generation.

Les Diabouiques often considered, along with Wages of Fear, to be his masterpiece is still a shocking, nasty, brilliant piece of storytelling. Here we get another sordid tale of infidelity. The Wife (played by Cluzout’s own wife, Vera!) of an Abusive, adulterious headmaster of a private school conspires with her husband’s lover to kill her husband. But when his corpse disappears and strange things begin to happen around the school, the Wife fears his ghost may be haunting her.

The final act of Les Diaboliques is rightfully so shocking and brilliant, including a bathtub scene that still has never been equaled (even by Hitchcock himself), that we can’t spoil it here. But Clouzot accomplishes something here that seems impossible for American storytellers so trained in the art of getting right to it, always keeping the story bumping along, etc. He carefully and deliberately builds atmosphere, tension, suspense across three quarters of the movie without tipping his hand so that the final ten minutes feel much like the heart attack our main character is always afraid she’s going to have.

It’s an open question if such a movie could work in today’s times but there’s a diamond of a lesson buried here for all filmmakers who want to make the absolute best movies.

Clouzot’s previous movie-the equally brilliant if very different-Wages of Fear tells the crazy story of desperate men hired to transport a truck full of nitroglycerine through the South American jungles. William Friedkin famously remade it here in the United States as Sorcerer. Clouzot here, also takes his time to get to the suspense. The first hour is almost completely devoted to developing character while the men wait and suffer in a dingy cafe/restaurant. But once they get in that truck and out into the jungle, every sequence is a nail biter.

In some ways, Clouzot’s final act which include the famous Picasso documentary The Mystery of Picasso with the famous sequence of Picasso making a sketch in the darkness with a flashlight as his pen (using a time lapse technique) and Clouzot’s unfinished Inferno about an older man wracked by jealousy over his younger wife show Clouzot restlessly experimenting with film technique.

The screen tests of Romy Schneider laughing, drinking, smoking in swirls of brilliantly colored light, glitter, dynamic movement are tantalizing. And inspiring.

In the end what makes Clouzot such a vital filmmaker to this day, at least for this programmer, is how he was able to marry story, character, atmosphere, world building, suspense, and experimental cinematic technique into a seamless relationship where the whole was almost always greater than the sum of its parts.

Cinema is such an incredible art-form and its potentialities are so wild and undomesticated that only a very few have been able to get even a majority of its elements in a kind of tuning where every part and element sing.

Clouzot was one such moviemaker. Watching his greatest movies is like an embarrassment of gifts under the Christmas Tree from a cinematic Santa who knew exactly what you needed.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.