Chamber Films will showcase the classic and the curious, the weird, the wired and wonderfully askew. There’s no theme, no thesis, no seam running through these films, unless there is. The subconscious is a hell of a film programmer.
Les Diaboliques
Dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot. 1955. Starring Simone Signoret, Vera Clouzot, Paul Meurisse.
The film that inspired Psycho. The film that inspired every Hammer thriller of the 1960’s and most of William H Castle’s too. Why? Because it’s a fantastic, creepy, spooky, twisty-turny masterclass in suspense and chicanery, that’s serious, funny, droll and sophisticated and, with all that, manages to stick a perfect film plot in the mix too.
Clouzot had already directed, in Le Corbeau and The Wages of Fear, two extraordinary films, but Les Diaboliques – The Fiends – is his masterpiece.
Based on a lurid potboiler by Boileau and Narcejac (like Hitchcock’s Vertigo), Clouzot inverts the novel’s central dynamic, making it more refined, and adds a proto-Columbo police inspector, to play the fool and run the protagonists ragged. The film’s central set-piece still has the power to make your skin crawl today, but there are plenty other spine-tinglers to keep you hooked to the silver screen.
This film does for bathing in a Prince of Wales sports jacket what Psycho did for showering in the nude.
