In the 1950s Alfred Hitchcock and Henri-Georges Clouzot were always looking over the directorial shoulder at each other. In Les Espions (The Spies in English) Clouzot attempts his most overt homage to one of Hitchcock’s amused thrillers… and gets it completely wrong.
A non-thrilling thriller crossed with a non-funny comedy is the result. Gérard Séty plays the Hitchcockian innocent abroad, a shrink running a struggling private psychiatric clinic who takes up an offer from a shady American agent in a bar to hide a spy on the run in return for a big wedge of cash. The Americans chose this man and this place, it seems, because it’s ideal as a safe space: nobody will think to look for an escaped spy in an asylum; and as real, working asylums goes it’s unproblematic. There are just two inmates, a mute (played by Clouzot’s wife Véra) and a morphine addict (Louis Seigner).
By the next morning Dr Malic’s chief nurse has gone, replaced with someone from the CIA, and there are two heavies installed in the kitchen. But so much for it being an ideal hiding place – outside, shadowy figures are lurking in the shrubbery and up telegraph poles, all pretending not to be there. At his local bar the barman has been swapped out for someone who’s an obvious agent. Malic’s clinic also seems suddenly popular with new would-be patients. Malic attempts to carry on as normal. Or as best has he can manage. And the infamous spy on the run hasn’t even arrived yet.
The IMDb trivia page for this movie tells us that British comedic star Terry-Thomas was who Clouzot really wanted to star in this movie. As Dr Malic, presumably. If so he must have had a very different movie in mind. Thomas was brilliant at playing conniving shysters but Séty’s Malic is a virgin among wolves, the still centre around which any number of fruity, florid characters revolve.
They’re an interesting bunch and the casting is fascinating – and also telling – Peter Ustinov as a Soviet agent pretending not to be, Sam Jaffe as an American agent pretending not to be, and the particularly excellent Martita Hunt (Miss Havisham in David Lean’s Great Expectations) as Malic’s tough-as-nails new head nurse. Later, Curd Jürgens as the international man of mystery.
All speak French and acquit themselves pretty well (as far as I can tell with my schoolboy knowledge).
The tonal aim appears to be Hitchcock’s mid-1950s larky thrillers like To Catch a Thief or The Trouble with Harry but Clouzot’s attempts at humour are heavy-handed, and the thriller stuff never seems to be really serious. There is no jeopardy in this movie.
What’s particularly strange is that Clouzot made this film in 1955, so probably right after The Wages of Fear and before Les Diaboliques, the pair of them the look-no-further exemplars of how brilliant Clouzot could be. The Wages of Fear is simply one of the most nerve-racking, knuckle-whitening films ever made. Les Diaboliques – a film Hitchcock wanted to make but Clouzot got there first – is full of little touches Hitchcock would later re-appropriate himself.
In both of those the psychology just works. In Les Espions it simply doesn’t. Nobody is plausible, not even movie-plausible (much lower bar). Clouzot moves his characters and the action along at a comic pace, with not a hint of a smile but many a comedically broad performance (Ustinov, in particular).
Being generous, this could be seen as a template for the kind of spy spoof that the 1960s was full of, in the wake of James Bond. And it is beautifully made, with fluid cameras, thoughtful lighting and smart edits. And the cast is always watchable. Clouzot even stages his final section on board a movie train, Hitchcock style, and uses all sorts of familiar Hitchcockian tricks, as if to say “hey, I can do that too”. But he can’t. He’s not even close. What a disappointment.
Les Espions aka The Spies – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
