Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System

Noutions Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

daoldiges By the time I'd gotten around to seeing Le Diaboliques I'd seen many imitators and copiers of this French classic. That didn't lesson the strength and impact of this film for me. The performances, story, and direction are all solid and very memorable, and still a film to see.

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . of this often mislabeled flick. If you cut out the groaning toilets, bellowing pipes, thundering bath tubs, and plugged up pools gurgling throughout DIABOLIQUE, you wouldn't have much of a movie left. As the plot takes its characters from city to village to last chance gas station all around France, the one constant here is lavatory facilities that no doubt date back to the Era of Napoleon (if not Charlemagne). Should anyone in a large building unleash a loo, the resulting racket proves ear-shattering for folks several floors or hallways removed. Tubs are even worse, easily drowning out the din made by lawn mowers or revving jet engines, as these "Moaning Myrtles" register 150 decibels plus. It's not too hard to understand why the average French swimming pool is filthier than the waste tank at a pig farm, given the lacking of being drained after their initial installation. DIABOLIQUE documents why no one from Nice to Dunkirk dare empty a natatorium, because the ensuing cacophony is enough to literally raise the dead. My brother-in-law is a master plumber, and he tells me that his French counterparts are eligible for "Poolitical Asylum" in the U.S.

Antonius Block What a fantastic, smart, macabre thriller this is. Director Henri- Georges Clouzot doesn't waste any time getting us emotionally involved, with a man (Paul Meurisse) abusing both his wife (Véra Clouzot) and his openly acknowledged mistress (Simone Signoret), and in making it apparent that the two are plotting to kill him. Meurisse and Clouzot run a boarding school full of rowdy little boys, and Signoret is another of the teachers there. Meurisse is mean to everybody, so we certainly don't sympathize with him. I'm not going to spoil this film by describing anything else. Trust me, it's best you don't know any more. Just sit back and watch it unfold, and you'll be happy you did. I will say that it's got a couple of incredibly eerie scenes that are well worthy of the often overused adjective 'classic'. This one is not just Hitchcock-esque, it's right up there with that director's best work.

sharky_55 The twist ending to Les Diaboliques has been imitated and ripped off so many times that by now modern audiences can pinpoint its existence fairly easily, but back in 1955 it was ripe and fresh in the imagination. If great movies stand the test of time, then Les Diaboliques may not fit that particular criteria. Henri-Georges Clouzot, dismissed by his New Wave compatriots, dealt predominantly in thrillers and is most known for his previous feature before this one, The Wages of Fear. In Wages he allots nearly half of the film in setting up his protagonists and their dead-end setting of Las Piedras, connected to the rest of the world not by plane or road but jungle pathways, tar pits and precarious wooden supports atop rocky cliffs. The film in its full, uncut version (the censors correctly guessed his intent) however is less a character study and more an allegorical jab at the capitalist system that forces the workers into their corners. Clouzot spends the first hour defining them, but the next holding them at arm's length because of the broader message - William Friedkin's remake, Sorcerer, allocates each strand of the story its own separate introduction but falls to the same error. The ending, a deeply ironic sequence juxtaposing the merry waltz of the naive lover and the askew existentialism of Mario is a cheap parting shot at the low hanging fruit of Hollywood. But the scenarios beforehand show Clouzot to be a master of constructing tension, even for characters with fuzzy and undefined pasts. His scenes rightfully are not scored, leaving only the natural sounds of the environment to be magnified and exaggerated in the minds of those who traverse them. Each chilling incident in Les Diaboliques relies on the paranoia of Christina to elevate curiosity into fear; elsewhere the tone is casually cheery as the rest of the school's inhabitants discuss the events in passing. Clouzot's objectiveness, then, is justified. He doesn't dip into the sub-conscious like Hitchcock might; everything is shot matter-of-fact, with no POVs, and the selective closeups merely show what is there to be seen. Though a few moments reveal noir and expressionist imagery, it scarcely reaches the heights of puzzles such as Vertigo (the intensity of associative colour and the dizziness of the dolly zoom) or Rebecca (the overwrought set design and the camera tracing ghostly movement). All its elements are able to be rationalised by Fichet, who enters jarringly as the pipe-wielding Holmes figure, also possessing similar levels of superhuman deduction. If the retired police chief carries himself with amusement and seems to relish watching them squirm, it is a symptom of Christina's guilt closing in on her own conscience. The building of the mystery follows this same line of thought: we don't see the splotchy clue in the picture that might be a resurrected Michel, but merely her horrified reaction. When she sits up in bed in her white nightgown like a tucked-in child, a slimy hand reaches out from the shrouds of darkness to grab at her - it's merely Fichet, who has more questions and queries for her. Everything is inferred through her mind, and so gloves left at a typewriter, jostling sounds from the bathroom and a sliver of white light snaking through a crack in the doors all become terrifying, in her eyes and so too in ours. Véra Clouzot is the best of the actors. She has the bodily posture of a wooden board, like the stiff, frigid, battered woman she has become in the subjugation of her marriage. The conversations with her husband are not equal duels; each of his sneering insults must be fended off, and at times she seems to be bracing knowingly for impact before she even is slapped. While some might question the logic of a mistress banding together with the wife, here is a character who does not question such things because she has been bruised long enough that any relief is an opportunity immediately seized. She never stops to consider that Nicole, her masculine opposite, might have an ulterior motive every bit as filthy as the opening credits shot of the muddy pool. Clouzot assigns an anti-spoiler warning to maintain this logical twist ending (a move first utilised by Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, and later in the same vein with Hitchcock's Psycho). But he also throws a final spanner in the works. Having revealed all the answers he slips one last puzzle in: perhaps Christina did not die of a heart attack after all, and is still lurking the halls of the boarding school. Having pulled off the bait and switch, Clouzot can't bear to waste all the buildup of the supernatural and fantastical. It's like having your cake and eating it too.