Les Diaboliques (1955)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955) was based on Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s 1952 novel Celle qui n'était plus (translated into English as She Who Was No More).

The film was a huge hit in France and an international success and its critical reputation grew steadily.

In 1996 Jeremiah S. Chechik directed another adaptation, Diabolique. It has huge flaws and a trainwreck of an ending but a few interesting elements.

Hitchcock had been very keen to acquire the film rights to She Who Was No More but Clouzot beat him to the punch by a hair’s-breadth. A few years later Hitchcock adapted another Boileau-Narcejac novel, D'entre les morts, as Vertigo.

In his film Clouzot made major changes to the plot and further major changes were made in the 1996 film so if you’re familiar with any of the other versions do not assume that you knew exactly how the Clouzot film is going to end. I’m not going to talk about the plot at all since it does rely on a big twist and I don’t want to offer even the smallest hints.

Clouzot changed the setting to a private boys’ school. This works very well - a school has just the right hothouse atmosphere. Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse) is the headmaster. He’s a third-rate headmaster of a third-rate school. And the school belongs to his wife Christina (played by the director’s wife Véra Clouzot). She has all the money.

Michel is having an affair with one of the teachers, Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret).

Christina and Nicole are planning to murder Michel.

This is where the story starts to become strange and twisted. There’s a very odd relationship between the two women. They should hate each other. Instead there’s a weird bond between them. Modern critics and viewers will be tempted to assume they’re lesbians but they’re not and it’s nowhere near as simple as that. The bond is based on the fact that they are sharing a man. Both women love Michel and both women hate him.

There is a hint of sexual perversity. Michel bullies and humiliates both women but something has drawn both women to him.

This a story that deals with female sexuality and desire and emotion in ways that modern viewers might find disconcertingly grown-up, complex and subtle.

Véra Clouzot is extremely good as the neurotic Christina who is guilt-ridden before she’s even done anything. She’s probably been guilt-ridden her whole life.

The standout performer though is Simone Signoret as the ambiguous puzzling Nicole. Nicole thinks she has everything under control.

Les Diaboliques truly was a ground-breaking movie - a movie built entirely around a fiendish shock twist at the end. Since then countless crime and horror movies have employed this technique so a viewer watching this movie today is going to be on the lookout for such an ending. Even if you haven’t been told that this movie has a shock twist at the end you’ll be anticipating such a possibility because it’s become a tried and tested formula. But when Les Diaboliques came out in 1955 it knocked people’s socks off. They simply were not prepared for the possibility that the film had been playing games with them, leading them up the garden path. Sadly Les Diaboliques cannot possibly hit as hard today as it did then but that does not detract from its greatness and its originality or from its boldness.

The movie also benefits from some superbly atmospheric black and-white cinematography by Armand Thirard. This combines with the seedy setting that reeks of defeat and despair to create a superbly unsetting and uncomfortable air. There’s this all-pervasive feeling of wrongness.

The twist is the selling point but it’s the unhealthy emotional entanglements and the growing atmosphere of paranoia that really impresses.

Les Diaboliques is a crime thriller with some definite horror overtones and it’s a magnificent cinematic achievement. Very highly recommended.

The Criterion Blu-Ray looks great and the highlight of the extras is the interview with the always perceptive and entertaining Kim Newman.

I’ve also reviewed the Boileau-Narcejac novel She Who Was No More.

Witness in the City (1959)

Witness in the City (Un témoin dans la ville), directed by Édouard Molinaro in 1959, is included in the recent Kino Lorber French Noir Blu-Ray boxed set.

The screenplay was by the great French crime-writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. I believe it was based on one of their novels. They’re best known as the authors of the source novels for two of the greatest motion pictures ever made, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques and Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Witness in the City begins with a brutal murder of a woman on a train. We see the murderer, Pierre Verdier. There’s no ambiguity. We know it was murder. The case against him is however dismissed for lack of evidence.

The woman was the murderer’s mistress. Her husband Ancelin (Lino Ventura) is not going to take this lying down. Verdier had carried out a perfect murder. Now Ancelin plans a perfect murder of his own.

This all happens right at the beginning of the movie so I’m not giving away any spoilers. All this is just the setup.

The trouble with plans for perfect murders is that when put into practice some minor unforeseen circumstance always gums up the works. In this case it’s a witness. He didn’t see an actual murder, but he saw enough.

The movie is a hunt or rather it becomes a tale of two hunts.

Lino Ventura gives a nicely minimalist performance. It’s as if Ancelin is in some ways dead inside.

Henri Decaë provides some very fine very moody black-and-white cinematography.

There’s an enormous amount of night shooting. The movie really does have a noir city at night feel. There are a couple of scenes involving trains (alway a bonus) but a huge amount of the film takes place in cars, and cabs. The witness is a cab driver. Half the cab drivers in Paris end up being involved.

This is a movie in which characters are always in movement but not actually getting anywhere. They keep ending up driving down the same streets. The streets of Paris are like a gigantic spider web from which there is no escape. No matter how far and how fast you drive you can never leave that spider web. You always end up back where you started. The city will not allow you to escape. Noir cities are like that.

The driving scenes, some involving a dozen or more cars, are extremely well done. They have tension and energy but it’s a frustrated kind of energy. An energy that needs resolution but the resolution seems like it will never happen.

Overall I’m not sure that this ticks enough noir boxes to satisfy film noir purists (there is for example no femme fatale) but it’s definitely a movie that film noir fans will love. There’s as much pessimism as one could desire. There are also some existentialist touches.

Things are not full explained, and this is clearly deliberate. We know what happened on the train at the beginning but not why. Verdier gives his account of the events that led to the murder but Ancelin doesn’t believe him, and Verdier has a motive to lie. On the other hand Ancelin has a motive to lie to himself.

There are some touches that you wouldn’t get away with in a Hollywood movie of the 50s, such as Ancelin’s encounter with a prostitute.

We’re never quite sure if we should be sympathising with Ancelin or not.

Witness in the City is slightly offbeat noir. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Édouard Molinaro’s Back to the Wall (1958) which is also superb. It’s included in the Kino Lorber set, along with Speaking of Murder (1957) which is not as impressive as the other two movies but still very much worth watching. There are no extras included with any of the three movies.

The Anderson Tapes (1971)

The Anderson Tapes is a 1971 Sidney Lumet movie and the fact that I generally dislike Lumet’s movies put me off seeing it for years.

On the other hand it’s a heist movie. And it’s a 70s paranoia movie. And it’s all about surveillance. These are all things I like a lot.

Robert Anderson (Sean Connery), known as Duke, has been in prison for ten years. That will prove be significant. He’s known as a very skilled and professional safe-cracker but the world has changed in ten years. Duke doesn’t really understand the ramifications of new technology for his kind of old school criminal.

He has a plan to rob an apartment building. There are six apartments, all inhabited by very rich people with all sorts of valuables - cash, negotiable bonds, jewels, paintings, objets d’art, coin collections.

He needs financing to set his scheme up and he gets it from the Mob. A very big Mob boss owes him a debt of honour.

There’s another ticklish complication. A little task that the Mob wants him to do for them.

Anderson puts together a team. The heist is intricately planned and it’s a good plan. There’s one problem. The authorities have Anderson and everyone else involved under surveillance. Not just one government agency, but a whole bunch of them - the narcotics bureau, the FBI, even the IRS. They’ve been under surveillance right from the start. Every movie they’ve made has been taped, photographed and filmed.

This is a movie in which everyone is being watched all the time. This was 1971, when the surveillance state was still in its infancy, but this movie is already taking a deep dive into tech paranoia.

The usual formula for a heist movie is that a master criminal comes up with a plan, we see the detailed planning and the rehearsals and then when the plan is finally put into operation something inevitably goes wrong. In this movie everything has already gone wrong right from the start.

When we come to the heist Lumet gets a tad tricky, with the narrative jumping back and forward between the present and the future. It’s a bit risky but he pulls it off rather well.

One very cool thing about this movie is that it features so much incredibly cool analog technology that was absolutely cutting edge in 1971. The Feds even have a super-computer, with punch cards and flashing lights just like a proper computer. And ham radio plays a key role, which is amazingly cool.

Connery gives a standard Connery performance but that’s OK because that standard Connery performance is always fun to watch. And he did tweak that standard performance for different films. In this one he lacks Bond’s charm and humour.

Dyan Cannon is quite good as his girlfriend. Christopher Walken, in his first significant feature film role, is good as a young crim befriended by Anderson in prison. Martin Balsam is there as well, as reliable as ever. Ralph Meeker is a riot as an uber-tough cop.

The heist itself occupies a very large chunk of the running time and it’s superbly done. There are only occasional moments of violence and that’s why they work and why they hit hard. Suddenly it’s not a game. And suddenly the guys who thought they had everything under control realise they’ve been fooling themselves.

The Anderson Tapes is a fine exercise in suspense and paranoia. This is easily the best move I’ve ever seen from Lumet. Highly recommended.

This movie is paired with Physical Evidence on a double-header Blu-Ray from Mill Creek. There are no extras but it looks terrific.

Cocktail Hour (1933)

Cocktail Hour is a 1933 Columbia pre-code romance with a touch of crime. It was directed by Victor Schertzinger.

Cynthia Warren (Bebe Daniels) is a successful illustrator who is sure that a woman does not need marriage, she just needs freedom. Men are just amusements.

Prince Philippe de Longville (Barry Norton) follows her around like a lovesick puppy dog. He wants to marry her. He’s a nice boy but he’s just a boy. Cynthia is only interested in men so even if she did not want to get married she wouldn’t marry Philippe.

Randy (Randolph Scott) is a different matter. He’s a man. She’s really attracted to him, but won’t marry him.

Randy knows about women. He pretends that he doesn’t care. That drives her crazy. Even if she doesn’t want to marry him how dare he stop pursuing her!

Cynthia heads off to Europe. On the ship she befriends tempestuous Russian pianist Olga Raimoff (Muriel Kirkland). Olga is really just Tessie Burns from Kansas.

And Cynthia has a shipboard romance with the handsome charming William Lawton (Sidney Blackmer). He sweeps Cynthia off her feet. He quotes poetry to her. No girl can resist that.

The affair sours a bit when the ship docks at Southampton and she is introduced to his wife. She heads for Paris. Philippe is there and he’s still mooning over her and he’s insanely jealous of her shipboard over. Randy is there as well, but Cynthia still won’t marry him.

What really bothers Cynthia is that William’s wife Pat (Marjorie Gateson) knows all about Cynthia and doesn’t care. She doesn’t take Cynthia the slightest bit seriously as a threat. There’s nothing more humiliating to a woman than to be not taken seriously as a romantic rival.

William wants to keep Cynthia as his bit on the side. That doesn’t please Cynthia and obviously it’s not to the liking of either Philippe or Randy. It leads to a moment of violence in a hotel room.

Usually I like Bebe Daniels but Cynthia is a character I couldn’t warm to. Too cold and then she switches to self-pity. Randolph Scott is good but doesn’t get enough to do.

I liked Sidney Blackmer’s restrained performance. He doesn’t overdo the charming seducer thing which makes it more plausible that a girl like Cynthia would fall for him.

Several things make this very much a pre-code movie. It’s obvious that the shipboard romance between Cynthia and William went beyond flirtation - had it been mere flirtation her angry reaction when she discovers he’s married would not have made sense.

Pat Lawton is indifferent to her husband’s love affairs of which he has had many, which is certainly very pre-code. Infidelity is not something that shocks any of the characters.

There’s a “battle of the sexes” element to the relationship between Cynthia and Randy and a conflict between traditional ideas on marriage (represented by Randy) and Cynthia’s ambition to be a career woman.

Cocktail Hour is reasonably enjoyable and I love movies set at least partially on board ships. Recommended.

Sony’s Blu-Ray offers no extras but the movie looks extremely good.

Fat City (1972)

John Huston’s career had been in both the commercial and critical doldrums for years when he made Fat City in 1972. It was a surprise commercial hit and critics loved it. It put Huston back on top. Three years later Huston would make the best movie of his career, The Man Who Would Be King (1975).

Fat City is 1970s bleakness at its bleakest. This is nihilism without a trace of hope. The only movie of this period that can match it for bleakness is They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? but in that film the characters are driven to despair by economic desperation. It is set at the worst point of the Depression.

But Fat City is set in 1972. The 70s economic crisis was grim but it didn’t start until the Oil Crisis of late 1973. In 1972 the economy was going fine. If you were a loser in 1972 you couldn’t blame the economy. The characters in this movie are all losers and it’s all their own work.

The setting is Stockton, California. Huston and his cinematographer Conrad Hall make it look like an annexe of Hell. Everything is decaying, squalid, depressing and ugly.

Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) is a washed-out prizefighter. He was never much good but now at 30 he’s trying to make a comeback. In a gym he spars with 18-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges). Billy thinks the kid has promise. He introduces him to his manager, Ruben Luna (Nicholas Colasanto). Ernie is on his way.

But he isn’t really. He’s on his way in the world of third-rate semi-pro boxing. In this world if you win you still lose. Billy never even had a sniff at a title fight. He would always have remained in the sleazy desperate lower echelons of the fight game. He made some money for a while until he got so badly pummelled in a fight that he lost his mojo. If he makes a comeback he’ll be fighting for pitifully small purses in fleapit stadiums until inevitably he’ll get pummelled again and will end as another punch-drunk wreck. He just isn’t smart enough to avoid such a fate.

Ernie has some talent, but not enough. Not enough to get him anywhere near a championship fight. At best he will eke out a living until eventually he gets his brain turned to mush, just like all the other failed fighters. Ernie is also not smart enough to avoid such a fate.

And while Billy looks up to Ruben it’s an illusion. Ruben is the third-rate manager of a string of third-rate boxers. Ruben doesn’t have the training skills or the business acumen to develop anything but third-rate fighters. Ruben is a loser as well.

Billy drifts into a relationship with Oma (Susan Tyrrell), a broken-down self-pitying drunk. She has had three marriages. They all failed. It has never occurred to Oma that this might have been her fault. It has never occurred to Oma that anything has ever been her fault.

When we first see Oma we assume she’s around 40. But Susan Tyrrell was 26 at the time and I suspect Huston deliberately chose a young actress. If you look closely at Oma you can see that she isn’t 40, she’s a young woman who has let herself go to an extraordinary degree. Oma is the last woman in the world that Billy should get mixed up with, and Billy is last man in the world that Oma should become involved with. We know that the relationship will just make things worse for both of them but they’re both incapable of making good decisions.

Meanwhile Ernie has met Faye (Candy Clark). Very soon she has trapped him into marriage by deliberately becoming pregnant. She thinks it’s a clever move but they’re both too young and irresponsible for marriage and Ernie is in no financial position to support a wife and child. We know that the marriage will ruin both their lives, but they’re too dumb to know any better.

For me the weakness of this movie is that I found it difficult to care about people so determined to remain losers. They’re too dumb and too self-pitying to care about. But maybe that’s just me.

The performances are all effective.

There are two major boxing scenes and Huston does some clever misdirection in each of them. In one there’s some obvious foreshadowing but it doesn’t play out quite as he’s led us to believe it will. In the other we’re led to expect a particular result because that’s the way other boxing movies would play it but Huston pulls the rug from under us.

The ending is interesting. I saw it one way, others see it another way.

I didn’t exactly enjoy this movie but if you’re prepared to join Huston in a deep dive into despair and misery you can admire the skill with which he conducts us on that dive. Recommended, assuming you enjoy watching awful things happen to hopeless people.

Tarzan the Ape Man (1981)

Tarzan the Ape Man was released in 1981. This is the notorious Bo Derek Tarzan movie. The one directed by her husband John Derek. Everybody knows this is a really bad movie because everyone says so. And film critics said so, so it must be true.

Personally I don’t care what everybody knows and I certainly don’t care what film critics think so I’m going to approach this one with an open mind.

Bo Derek burst onto the film scene with her role in Blake Edwards’ 10. It was bit part but she got all the attention. Right from the start critics were out to get her.

This was an attempt to do a slightly different sort of Tarzan movie. Tarzan enters the picture quite late.

In 1910 Jane Parker (Bo Derek) arrives in Africa to be reunited with her father. She has never met him. She knows him only by reputation. He is the legendary explorer James Parker (Richard Harris).

Jane insists on joining him on his latest expedition. He is hoping to discover the fabled Inland Sea, and perhaps there are other things he hopes to find.

Also accompanying him will be big game hunter and photographer Harry Holt (John Phillip Law).

While they’re camped deep in the jungle blood-curdling cries are heard in the night. It is the legendary Tarzan. No-one knows who or what Tarzan is. Some say he is a gigantic white ape. Some say he is a gigantic white man. Everyone fears him.

Jane is rather surprised when she meets Tarzan. He rescues her from a lion. She realises that he is only a man. She also notices that he is quite a man.

Having caught sight of Tarzan at last James Parker is convinced that this jungle man is appallingly dangerous.

Tarzan carries her off. This is what James Parker feared would happen. He has no doubt that Tarzan intends to make Jane his mate. James is determined not to let that happen.

There’s a weird kind of courtship taking place between Jane an Tarzan but other sinister things are afoot. A hostile tribe is tracking the expedition. It’s at this point that the movie becomes interestingly weird and slightly surreal and perhaps just a bit kinky.

As I watched this film I was trying to see what it was about Bo Derek’s performance that earned her so much critical derision. But I couldn’t see it. I think her performance is fine. There’s one moment, where Jane is watching Tarzan and it’s clear that she is, for the first time in her life, feeling the stirrings of sexual lust. Miss Derek really nails it. She gets the point across subtly and without being crass, and in a rather sweet good-natured way.

I was also trying to spot exactly what it was about about the job John Derek does as director here that made him the target of critical venom. Again I couldn’t see it. He does a perfectly fine job.

Richard Harris goes way over the top but you don’t hire Richard Harris if you want a low-key performance. This movie is very much a story of obsession. James Parker is an obsessed inspired madman. Which really was true of most of the real-life explorers of that age. Harris plays him as a larger-than-life character, which is as it should be.

There’s also a lot of emphasis on the father-daughter relationship. Initially she hates him. Gradually she falls under his spell. She starts to like the idea of having a remarkable man as a father.

And of course there’s the love story, which is handled nicely. Jane and Tarzan are like two nervous teenagers, strongly physically attracted to each other but too innocent to know what to do about it.

Some of the action scenes are edited in very odd ways. It is quite a weird movie at times but that aspect, along with the slight hints of perversity, make it in some ways quite close to the spirit of pre-WW2 pulp adventure fiction.

And course Miss Derek takes her clothes off.

This is a slightly oddball movie but I rather liked it, and I liked Bo Derek. I’m going to highly recommend it because that’s the crazy sort of guy I am.

And yes I agree that Tarzan and His Mate (1934) is still the best Tarzan movie.

Back to the Wall (1958)

Back to the Wall (Le dos au mur) is one of three 1950s French crime movies included in Kino Lorber’s recent French Noir Blu-Ray boxed set. It’s based on the novel Délivrez-nous du mal by Frédéric Dard.

It lays out its noir credentials right at the start. The opening scene is not just a night scene, but it’s that film noir kind of night. You know, those nights when you know that bad stuff is going to happen.

Then we see a sinister guy in a trench-coat and he’s clearly up to no good.

We’re not surprised that there’s a murder. At least we assume it’s a murder although we don’t see exactly what happened.

We then get some grisly scenes of the body being disposed of.

It then gets even more noir, with a flashback and voiceover narration.

There’s an adulterous wife, Gloria Decrey, played by Jeanne Moreau during the film noir icon phase of her career. The cuckolded husband knows about her betrayal but his reaction is not quite what we expect. He intends to do something about it but his plan is convoluted and indirect.

There’s a blackmail angle. There’s a sleazy private detective and he’s surprised that what he’s being asked to do is not quite what he anticipated.

It becomes a war of nerves.

What a director doesn’t tell you is just as important as what he does tell you, and being told things can be just as misleading as not being told if the director knows what he’s doing. You’re going to suspect from the start that there may be a bit of misdirection going on but suspecting such a thing does not necessarily help. This movie keeps leading up to obvious plot twists and then the plot twist turns out not to be the one we expected.

We understand part of the motivations of one of the key characters but we don’t know what that person’s actual intentions are.

And there’s plenty of suspicion, guilt and emotional ambiguity.

I don’t know anything about director Édouard Molinaro but he does a confident assured job here, leading us up the garden path with considerable skill. He has a clever literate script from which to work which always helps.

I know almost nothing about Gérard Oury, whose acting career apparently petered out by the early 1960s, but he’s very good here. It’s a very noir performance as a man in control on the surface but in turmoil underneath.

This movie was in the same year that Elevator to the Gallows AKA Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) made Jeanne Moreau a huge star. She’s excellent here. Gloria is not exactly a femme fatale, or at least not in a straightforward way, but she has the same kind of disastrous effect on men.

This is a nicely shot and very atmospheric movie.

Back to the Wall is genuine film noir as well as being a clever mystery suspense thriller, and it’s very highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray offers the movie in French with English subtitles. The transfer is extremely good (the movie was shot in black-and-white) and thankfully there are no extras.

I’ve also reviewed Speaking of Murder (1957) from this set. It’s not quite as good but it’s well worth a watch. And another French noir very much worth seeing is Witness in the City (1959).