Henri-Georges Clouzot created one of the most taught suspense thrillers of all time with Les Diaboliques. His story, a misaligned love triangle with a malicious headmaster at its apex and a vengeful mistress and an innocent wife at is remaining corners, is surrounded by a murky atmosphere which echoes the moral decrepitude of his characters. However, aside from being one of the landmarks of cinema, the work is notable for being the primary influence upon Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
A sadistic headmaster of a Parisian boarding school, Michel Delasalle (Paul Meurisse), is lured to a house in a nearby town of Niort, whereby his wife, Christina (Véra Clouzot, the director’s wife), and his mistress, Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret) drown him in a bathtub before transporting his body back to Paris where they dispose of the corpse in the school’s pool. However, the plot thickens when Michel’s corpse fails to appear once the pool has been drained.
Clouzot, first and foremost, weaves a cunning, anxiety-producing narrative. Unlike most thrillers, at the offset of the film he provides his audience with a just motive for the killers as the complexity of the plot creates intrigue instead of allowing the action to be the sole carrier of the narrative. We are introduced to Christina, who is verbally abused by her husband, moments after meeting Nicole, who is physically maltreated by Michel. The headmaster’s malevolence does not cease with the women in his life. His unabashed malice (aside from openly sustaining a mistress who works alongside his wife) extends to the other teachers of the school, Drain (Pierre Larquey) and Raimond (Michel Serrault), as well as the students (which are forced to eat rotten fish due to Michel’s miserly ways). Thus, the audience openly accepts Nicole’s incentive to murder Michele while we urge the reluctant figure of Christina (who objects due to her Catholic upbringing which states the murder is a sin and not, paradoxically, the fact that Michel doesn’t deserve to die) to abandon her misgivings and agree to the conspiracy.
No sooner than after the women have completed their task–Christina luring her husband to the Niort house on the premise of asking for a divorce knowing it will enrage Michel and propel him to them–Clouzot has us regret our efforts as we watch the Raskolnikovian guilt begin to bear upon Christina as her heart condition (Misses Clouzot actually died of a heart attack five years after the production) consequentially escalates. She demands that Plantiveau (Jean Brochard), the school’s grounds man, drain the pool so as to reveal her crime in order to be free of her moral burden (which, as we issue a much needed sigh of relief as the camera closes in on the near vacated pool, our throats instantaneously close as Plantiveau leisurely rakes the bottom). To exacerbate matters, Clouzot then introduces Alfred Fichet (Charles Vanel), a private detective, after issuing us false hope in the form of a newspaper article reporting that an unidentified corpse was found in the Seine. The audience winces each time Fichet places a coincidental question to either of the ladies as Nicole coolly attempts to veil their involvement via premeditated linguistic juggling while Christina’s reactions instantly negate her partner’s efforts. The tension created by Christina’s inability to blanket her guilt is second only to the presence of Herboux (Noël Roquevert), the upstairs tenant in Nicole’s house in Niort, as he almost stumbles upon the couple’s crime. This occurs after we cringe our way through Christina almost abandoning her and Nicole’s plans, which would then present Nicole (as well as Christina) in an awkward situation which, undoubtedly, would evoke Michel’s wrath. (The clincher for Christina’s decision to engage in the murder is overtly comical in that Nicole has spiked a bottle of wine with a sedative and, having hesitated in allowing her husband to drink, Michel begins to berate Christina as she then proceeds to graciously pour one after another.)
Compounding the anxiety which Clouzot brings to masterful effect, the film is laced with a literally slimy atmosphere. In Noel Carroll’s text, The Philosophy of Horror, he states that the grotesque is a primary component by which the horror artist achieves terror. Instead of presenting a physically grotesque antagonist, the director represents the moral erosion of his characters by surrounding them with algae-filled pools, dilapidated rooms, and rotten fish. The end result is a film which allows its audience to almost smell the decay.
Interestingly, Clouzot also proposes a theme of lesbianism in that the two women, whom under ordinary circumstances would be antagonistic to one another, come together and, at one point, even share a bed. However, nine years before Robert Aldrich’s Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Clouzot concludes his thriller with a plot twist which, regardless of the viewer’s gifts of divination, will be revelatory. Yet, if one possess such an acute prophetic vision that the climax is predictable, the director then issues yet another plot twist upon the previous one. Interestingly, what is more thrilling than the film’s resolution is, like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Les Diaboliques is a black humor piece which only becomes funny upon subsequent viewings as we listen again for the first time as various characters sardonically present the entire plot before our now veteran eyes.
Yet, aside from creating one of the most suspenseful films in all of cinema, Clouzot’s film is historically significant for another reason: Aside from the story of Ed Gein, Les Diaboliques served as the primary inspiration (alongside Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary), mostly in tone, pacing, and humor, for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Hitchcock gives a cinematic nod to his debtor in that the corpse found in the Seine is numbered “4702.” While making Psycho, one of the kid names for the production was “4701.” Initially, Hitchcock attempted to obtain the rights to Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s novel Celle qui n’était plus, which Clouzot’s film is based. After the French director beat the American master to the source material, the writers wrote D’Entre les Morts specifically for Hitchcock, who adapted the work into what is now known as Vertigo. (Boileau and Narcejac were also responsible for Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face.)
Henri-Georges Clouzot presents a bleak tale of humanity’s moral decay with les Diabolique. As the ethics of the only upstanding character begins to erode, the screen fills with literal decay as the director bombards his audience with shabby buildings, a pool overwrought with algae, and rotten fish. Ultimately, after having completed his narrative voyage, having escorted his viewers through a quagmire of tension and anxiety, Clouzot paved the way for Alfred Hitchcock to present his macabre, sardonic depiction of insanity five years later in the figure of Norman Bates.
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