Henri-Georges Clouzot

La Prisonnière

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Josée opens her front door

To that list of 1960s films about voyeurism add La Prisonnière, the great Henri-Georges Clouzot’s last film, his only (completed) one in colour and a worthy, if weird entrant in the canon containing Psycho, Peeping Tom and Blowup. There is definitely something very, very Hitchcock going on in this offering from 1968, made when Hitchcock had gone off the boil. And so had Clouzot, to be honest, though Clouzot has the edge on his old rival here. Looking, seeing, watching but not taking part is one of the ideas. Alongside a vague discussion about women’s complicity in their own enslavement in the story of a TV editor who becomes fascinated with a gallery … Read more

Manon

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Manon and Desgrieux on the run

Manon isn’t Henri-Georges Clouzot’s best film by a long stretch but it is a great example of how good he was at what he did. A richly detailed story about an amoral woman and the man she falls for, its interesting personal angle is that Clouzot is possibly using it to examine his own behaviour during wartime. The story is an updating of Manon Lescaut, by Abbé Prévost, a story familiar to most French people, who would also be familiar with the other “Manon” – Manon des Sources (which has also been turned into a film several times). Not to be confused. Prévost’s story remains popular because there’s sex and scandal aplenty in … Read more

The Murderer Lives at Number 21

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Suzy Delair and Pierre Fresnay

Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock and (using a time machine) the Knives Out franchise jostle along chummily in The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (L’assassin habite… au 21), the 1942 feature debut by Henri-Georges Clouzot and a confident beginning by a film-maker who knows exactly what he’s about. Winking all the while at the audience, Clouzot gives us a murder right up front – a drunk in a bar who’s just won the lottery – done with a camera that slides between third-person omniscience to killer to victim, Clouzot as good as announcing himself as hugely talented before the film’s even got going, in the same way as the killer announces himself, with a … Read more

Les Espions aka The Spies

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Gérard Séty as Dr Malic

Alfred Hitchcock and Henri-Georges Clouzot spent the 1950s casting directorial glances of mutual admiration at each other. Les Espions (The Spies in English) is Clouzot’s most overt homage to one of Hitchcock’s amused thrillers… and he 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 is asked by an American agent to hide a spy on the run in return for a big wedge of cash. The Americans have chosen this place, it seems, because no one will think to look for an escaped spy in an asylum. Also, as a … Read more

Quai des Orfèvres

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Jenny Lamour and the inspector

“Quai des Orfèvres” means “the cops” in France in the same way that “Scotland Yard” does in the UK. So it’s no surprise that this classic from 1947 is a crime thriller. It’s a peculiarly knotty one, directed by the masterly Henri-Georges Clouzot, who also did the adaptation, from Stanislas-André Steeman’s original novel Légitime Défense. Clouzot did not have the novel in front of him as he worked, and had not read it for years, but he took Steeman’s basic idea and fleshed it out using his own characters, getting all sorts of plot details “wrong” as he worked. The result appalled Steeman, who discovered that Clouzot and writing collaborator Jean Ferry had … Read more

Les Diaboliques

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Christina and Nicole

Les Diaboliques is the film that Alfred Hitchcock missed out on making after getting pipped to the post by another master of suspense, Henri-Georges Clouzot. If the story is true, Clouzot stayed up all night reading the original novel, Celle qui n’était plus, and then called writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac the next morning, desperate to have the rights. By the time Hitchcock rang a few hours later those rights were no longer available. Hitchcock did not walk away entirely empty handed. Boileau and Narcejac went on to write D’Entre les Morts for him, which he turned into Vertigo, currently ranked at number one in the Sight & Sound 100 Greatest Films … Read more

Les Diaboliques

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Simone Signoret and Vera Clouzot in Les Diaboliques

If you’re working yourself towards film-buffery, you really need to have seen something by master of suspense Henri-Georges Clouzot – “the French Hitchcock” he is often called, when Jacques Deray or Claude Chabrol aren’t using the sobriquet. You may already have seen the masterful The Wages of Fear, Clouzot’s 1953 tale of gelignite being driven across the South American jungle. It’s well worth adding Les Diaboliques, 1954’s tale of the murder most horrid – drugged, drowned – of a brutish husband by a fragile wife (Vera Clouzot) and his scheming mistress (Simone Signoret, none better). Job done, except the body keeps disappearing. Less a whodunit, more a wheresitgone, Les Diaboliques also strongly prefigures … Read more