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Summary: WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR![.]?
Review: "Diabolique" was my first foray into foreign-made movies. Wow! What a movie! This is a movie that could have been made just this year. Timeless tale of two-timing husband, and what happens when neglected wife and abused mistress plot revenge. If you don't mind reading subtitles, as I don't speak French, then you will enjoy this thriller! Buy this movie!
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Summary: H.G. Clouzot: Maitre d'horreur
Review: "A Painting is always moral when it is tragic and gives the horror of the things it depicts," says Barbey d'Aurevilly, the thinker Clouzot chose to quote in the beginning of this thrilling masterpiece of Twentieth century international film. Of course this movie has lost some of its "scary" appeal--and why should it not with all the Predators and Terminators and Vampires that Stan Winston creates nowadays?--but it still has its personae, its aura that is so unique and so fascinating to study. Clouzot is an absolute genius, and his cast is superb: the illustrious Simone Signoret, the greatest of all French actresses, the original, the best; Vera Clouzot is wonderful despite the quite fake death scene; and the husband (Paul Meurisse) is excellent as well, holding his own in a small part with two great actresses. What is brilliant about this film is the directing: it is one of a kind, and it really steals the show. The atmosphere of the school and the murky waters, the heart dysfunctions and the worrisome looks, the police and the undertakers and, ultimately, the doomed shower curtain and the deathly photographs, all together display Clouzot as a master of his craft. This is one of the greatest films of the 20th century, one that began European interest in mysterious, almost horrific, films and an international craze for the unknown. It's got the ending that is so difficult not to talk about among those who have no idea what to expect, so be careful who you talk to! All you need to know is it's truly high art.
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Summary: high quality dvd, high quality film. a must!
Review: Another gorgeous transfer. NOT for fans of the 1996 Hollywood re-make. Criterion Collection DVDs are simply the best out there. Bravo.
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Summary: 'Diabolique' is first class suspense.
Review: As many well know, Hitchcock and Clouzot were both trying to get the rights to the book on which DIABOLIQUE is based on and as you can see Clouzot beat out Hitch. While I think that Hitch being the master that he was could have made it better adding things here and there that Clouzot did not I believe Clouzot did a fine job with this movie. I'll skip the plot synopsis since you probably know it already. The direction is very reminiscint of Hitch and that is because even Hitchcock himself admitted to using this movie as inspiration for PSYCHO (the similarties are all to obvious). Clouzot opts to not use a musical score (with the exception of the music in the opening titles which is very scary indeed) and instead decides to try a different apporach by letting the suspense build up by the use of his direction and the performances of the actors. This works most of the time but I do believe that this movie could have benefitted greatly by having music that was as scary as the one in the opening titles or maybe a low key violen score (the opening title music seems to have inspired Herrmann as well). He uses shadows quite a lot in this movie and he empahsizes the sounds of many mundane things such as a faucet dripping or creaky floorboards which today is done to death but it was still not as common place back then but at the time it was begininng to be. the emphasis on sound gives us a feeling of the paranoia that the two ladies in this movie feel after they have committed their crime. The acting is quite naturalistic I believe on the part of Signoret as the icy mistress of the school headmaster in the movie and the same goes for Paul Meurisse as the headmaster. Vera Clouzot's performance is a bit bigger but that's probably to put more on emphasis on her character than on all the other ones. She always looks like she is on the edge of hysteria and her performance helps propell much of the movie. This film provides a very dark look at human nature at it's lowest (the wife of the headmaster is an ex-nun who takes part in a murder which for a while she seems to (understandibly) relish). All in all a pretty suspenseful movie which is more than any thing else a portrait of the dark side of human nature.
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Summary: The Original International Shocker
Review: Based on the Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac novel CELLE QUI N'ETAIT PLUS, Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 DIABOLIQUE is easily among the most influential films of world cinema, leaving its mark on everything from Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO and PSYCHO to William Castle's THE TINGLER--but even so, and while Hitchcock's masterpieces can be said to at least equal the Clouzot original, few if any of the films spawned by DIABOLIQUE ever bested it.Variously known as DIABOLIQUE, LES DIABOLIQUES, and THE DEVILS, the film presents a complex story. Christina Delasalle (Vera Clouzot, wife of director Henri-Georges Clouzot), is a remarkably beautiful and considerably wealthy woman who has the misfortune to suffer from delicate health, personal timidity, and brutish husband Michel (Paul Meurisse.) The two operate a boys' school that Christina owns, and among the teachers is hard-nosed Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret), who has become Michel's mistress but who finds Michel every bit as unpleasant as wife Christina. An unlikely alliance springs up between the two women, and together they conspire to murder Michel and thereafter run the school for themselves. But although the murder seems to go as planned, the body goes missing, and the two women suddenly find themselves taunted by mysterious notes and strange happenings. Has Michel survived the attempt on his life? Or has the murder been discovered and the stage is being set for blackmail? In the wake of DIABOLIQUE's international success, the story has been told in so many variations that many may consider the original has lost some of the shock value it possessed when it first debuted, but even so the film has much to offer. This is particularly true in terms of style of performances. Director Clouzot endows the film with a sense of visual decay and a near-documentary tone that merge to create one of the most chilling atmospheres ever captured on screen. While Signoret's performance of the angry mistress is the more widely celebrated, she is equaled by Vera Clouzot, who has the more complex role and whose performance must carry the weight of the film's most disturbing moments; together they create a truly remarkable synergy of the most lethal kind. I have seen DIABOLIQUE in several different releases, and while the Criterion DVD is somewhat glitchy it is easily the best version available; one should avoid all other releases, particularly the truly atrocious release by Madacy. Strongly recommended, particularly to fans of internation cinema and classic suspense.
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Summary: Murder, Mystery & Suspense; A Big Winner!
Review: Beware of taking sides in this sordid suspence thriller, you just might make out the innocent to be the evil ones! The suspense is first rate, the story engaging, and you constantly change your mind about your predictions of the outcome. In the end you will be completely surprised! Simone Signoret is beautiful to watch, and Henri-Georges Clouzot is so easy to hate, while Vera Clouzot plays the long suffering victim to a t. You will love this film; Hitchcock couln't have treated the novel any better, even if he would have beat Clouzot to the film rights. Sit back and enjoy this film noire, it's one of the best!
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Summary: What the poolboy found
Review: DIABOLIQUE is a cautionary tale about the need to keep your swimming pool clean, or not, depending on the state of your marriage. Christina Delasalle (Vera Clouzot) owns a French boarding school for boys, which she runs with her husband Michel (Paul Meurisse). Also in residence is Michel's mistress, Nicole (Simone Signoret). The two women have become uneasy allies against Michel, who physically and emotionally abuses Christina. The two plot his murder. Over a holiday weekend, during which the school will be deserted except for the caretaker, Nicole and Christina motor off to Nicole's primary residence in a town some miles away, the latter without Michel's permission. Once the women are at Nicole's place, Michel is called knowing he'll immediately come to retrieve his wayward wife without telling the caretaker. He does what's predicted. Some whiskey is drugged; Michel drinks it and falls asleep. The plotters subsequently drown the brute in the bathtub, placing a heavy bronze statue on his chest to keep him underwater overnight. The next day, the body is schlepped back to the school in a trunk-sized basket, and subsequently dumped into a swimming pool so filthy that the bottom is invisible. The working hypothesis is that once Michel floats to the surface, he'll be thought to have drowned there. But the corpse never appears and isn't part of the sludge at the bottom when the pool is drained, ostensibly to recover some lost keys. Uh-oh. And he looked mighty dead to me. DIABOLIQUE probably worked better when it was originally released (1955). It was a simpler time. I really didn't become engaged with the plot until the water was drained from the pool and ... voila! The last third of the film provided an opportunity for mild intellectual curiosity, and the last ten minutes or so a modicum of suspense. Virtually useless was Alfred Fichet (Charles Vanel), the ex-police official turned detective, who leisurely investigates and makes Peter Falk's Columbo seem positively animated in comparison. As a child of the latter half of the twentieth century, I can't but believe that special effects and color cinematography, combined with edgier sound, could produce a more knuckle-biting experience. (Ok, ok. I know that Sharon Stone did a panned remake of DIABOLIQUE in 1996. But I'm thinking of actresses of the caliber of, say, Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett in the Christina and Nicole roles respectively.) Perhaps it's just because I resent the fact that the original version has been decribed as a "grisly, horror classic" when, to my mind, it's just dated and neither grisly nor horrific.
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Summary: HEART ATTACK
Review: Director Henri-Georges Clouzot's DIABOLIQUE is one of these movies we, in french speaking countries, have seen at least a dozen times on TV in our teen days. Always with pleasure. In part, because of the terrific cast but mainly because of the whodunit plot. And now, a lot of years after (ten ?), I bought the DVD right after its release. I don't know exactly why, DIABOLIQUE being not the kind of movie you always put in your 10 best list. Maybe it was due to Vera Clouzot, the director's wife, who appeared only in a few movies with her spanish accent and who, in DIABOLIQUE, with her hair nicely combed, plays a character similar to the heroins of the fairy tales of our childhood. Or is it Simone Signoret who, with Anna Magnani and Bette Davis, is a star whose light hasn't faded with the years passing by. Paul Meurisse perhaps ? Or Charles Vanel, or Michel Serrault, already perfect in a comic role ? What I know for sure is that I can watch DIABOLIQUE again and again without being tired of it. In my opinion, it is a classic movie in the most noble sense of the term. No extra-features with the movie, sound perfect but a copy with some scratches and often grainy. Strange when one thinks of the quality of Criterion's work on, for instance, Ingmar Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL. A DVD for your library.
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Summary: Terror Classic...
Review: Fans of the genre know and revere DIABOLIQUE for the quietly grisly classic it proves to be. Director Clouzot fashions a manipulative plot whose tone is low-key, existential vengeance procedural. The bad guy is a repugnantly insolent school master played by Paul Meurisse. Simone Signoret (the original, CURSE of the CAT PEOPLE) is adroitly Mephistophelian prodding abused "wealthy" wife Christina into murdering her husband. The "diabolical" ambience of the film is maintained by grainy, rain-soaked, black-and-white terrain that the film immerses the viewer in. Vera Clouzot is fine as scrupulous, conscience-stricken Madame Delasalle unrelentedly pushed to killing her husband because he is obnoxious and...well, OBNOXIOUS. The movie appears to lull you into famailiar territory when a COLUMBO-like detective arrives to resolve "the mysterious death of Mon.D." But hang-tight. The end justifies the meandering, and rocks-your-socks-off. (Schlock master William Castle used DIABOLIQUE to inform the Vincent Price classic, HOUSE on HAUNTED HILL with its horrifyingly hokey acid-splasher finish.)
HALLOWEEN is coming. Consider DIABOLIQUE as a quirkily twisted thriller deserving its reputation as minor terror classic.....
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Summary: Great performances by Signoret and Clouzot
Review: Great art movie by Henri-Georges Clouzot, and phenomenal performances by Signoret and Vera Clouzot. I wished they were both 41 youngers and could have performed in the 1996 re-make. Would have been interesting to compare Stone to Signoret. Unfortunately, the DVD lacks quality, the same sub-title appeared for about 15 minutes, therefore if you don't speak French, you may be a little frustrated. Good movie to watch, since it will make you appreciate the effect technology had the last 40 years in movie making business. However, I would not recommend the purchase of this movie. If you have the money to spend, buy the 1996 re-make. Many thanks to amazon.com for bringing this movie to me and the public.
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