Beautiful and weird, Paul Vecchiali’s 1970 serial-killer thriller The Strangler (originally L’Étrangleur) is Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy mixed with Vecchiali’s humid take on queer sexuality. And on top of that it sends a string of women to their graves as if doing them a favour. A very very odd movie.
Vecchiali only died in 2023, aged 92, and was making movies to the end having started in 1961. Along the way he also happened to produce Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, currently number-one film in Sight and Sound’s prestigious poll, but he also wrote, acted and edited and occasionally composed the music for his films too.
Spread too thin? Not on the evidence of this, his second feature, a technically sophisticated, beautifully lit affair focusing on a boy who witnesses a strangling as a youth and grows up to be a strangler himself.
There are all sorts of curlicues hanging off that statement. For instance, the adult strangler kills his victims with white scarves he crochets himself. And he only kills sad people who want to die anyway. Women, because the men he meets don’t seem as desperate, or so he says. Then there is the strange character shadowing killer Émile (Jacques Perrin, also the film’s producer), known as the Jackal (Paul Barge), who swoops in and robs the victim after Émile has killed them (this infuriates Émile). Cop-on-the-case Inspector Dangret (Julien Guiomar) also has his own shadow, a beautiful woman called Anna (Eva Simonet), who insists that she can be the bait in the inspector’s trap and help him catch the killer. Instead she seduces Dangret. In an unguarded post-coital moment, the inspector appears to admit that he’s never slept with a woman before.
Nothing normal about all that at all. Another unusual aspect of this film is that all the male characters appear to be gay and the nearer they are to the edge of the frame, the further from the action, the more overtly gay they are. Male extras paw each other obviously, supporting characters engage in flirtatious chit-chat while cop Dangret and serial killer Émile work their way through a familiar but sexualised “cop taunted by the man he’s chasing” scenario. What sort of cop says, “I’ve just got out of the shower,” when answering the phone at home to the serial killer he’s hunting?
Vecchiali would later make a documentary about Albert Camus, and L’Étrangleur and Camus’s L’Étranger (The Strangler/The Stranger in English) are close enough in spelling for the words to be mistaken. For all his Freudian hang-ups and his uncertain sexuality Émile also appears to be the classic existential “hero” unsure what the point of life is about. As are his victims, Sisyphean heroines all (to borrow another of Camus’s existential tropes) who have tired of pushing the metaphorical boulder up the hill and would like an easy release from it all.
We are left in absolutely no doubt that the women want to die. Vecchiali even stages a few of the stranglings so we can see the beatific smile on a victim’s face as she enters the peace that passeth all understanding.
French giallo is how this is often described. It is as nightmarish but not as lurid as Italian giallo and Émile the killer is actually fairly likeable and only a bit creepy, as serial killers go. Vecchiali shoots it bright and colourful for the most part, and even includes a song and dance number at one point, an exquisitely lit cut-out-and-keep sequence introducing another of Émile’s victims, the careworn singer Monique (Jacqueline Danno).
The giallo tag earns its keep in the later sections, as Vecchiali shifts the action to the nocturnal world of cruising and prostitution, where a kind of Hitchcockian set-piece finale plays out as thief the Jackal and killer Émile square off, while cop Dangret stands there passively and Anna switches allegiances for closing moments of WTF proportions.
Throughout a lurking, ominously gliding camera. Throughout the sense that Hitchcock might have watched this before settling on adapting Arthur La Bern’s Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square into Frenzy (which featured a “necktie killer” whose sexuality was debatable). Throughout a weird transference thing going on, character to character, psyche to psyche, sex and death becoming as hopelessly muddled as the sexuality of almost everyone on screen. Even if you don’t like it, there’s a lot going on.
L’Étrangleur aka The Stranger – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
