Le Boucher (1970)

Le Boucher (The Butcher) is a 1970 Claude Chabrol film.

Chabrol was associated with the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). He was a fanatical admirer of Hitchcock. You’ll often find him described as the French Hitchcock. Having seen half a dozen of his movies I have no idea why anyone would see him as a French Hitchcock. In the films of his that I’ve seen Chabrol’s approach does not even slightly resemble Hitchcock’s.

That’s not intended as a criticism of Chabrol. Just because he admired Hitchcock does not mean that he wanted to slavishly copy Hitchcock’s techniques. Chabrol had his own ideas on how to make movies. Whether or not you think they were good ideas is up to you, but they were his own ideas.

Hitchcock’s approach to suspense was invariably to give the audience vital information denied to the protagonist. That creates fear by making us fearful on behalf of the protagonist - we know he is in danger but he doesn’t know that.

In this movie we know only what the protagonist knows. We discover things as she discovers them.

Helen (Stéphane Audran) is the school headmistress in a small French town. At a wedding she meets the local butcher, Popaul (Jean Yanne). They flirt in a tentative way. A day or so later they have dinner together. There’s obviously some attraction there, and they like each other. Helen is not the sort of woman who jumps straight into bed with a man. Popaul is not the sort of man who expects a woman to do that. He behaves like a perfect gentleman. They start to become fond of one another but they’re both taking things slowly. We slowly come to like both of them as well.

What I like is the way Chabrol focuses for so much of the movie on this slowly blossoming romance between Helen and Popaul. The unsettling elements are introduced in the background and appear to have no connection whatsoever with these two people.

We get a wonderful idyllic scene of the children playing in the schoolyard supervised by their pretty young headmistress. She obviously loves the children and they love her. This is a peaceful harmless sleepy little town.

Then we see the two black police vans pull up in the background, and the gendarmes have a police dog with them. A police dog always means something very bad - perhaps a missing child, perhaps a search for a body.

We find out, purely because one of the kids has heard this from his dad, that the dead body of a woman has been found in the woods. This has nothing to do with our two tentative lovers but we are now just a little uneasy.

The unease slowly builds as Helen discovers something that may be a clue or it may not be. We know no more about it than Helen does.

But we are getting worried. There are more murders.

There are a couple of lovely visual moments - the dripping blood scene is superbly done.

While it’s not a Hitchcock-style thriller there is an intriguing echo of Vertigo - the shots of the back of Stéphane Audran’s dead, focusing on her hair, mirroring those famous shots of Kim Novak in Vertigo. Given Chabrol’s fondness for Hitchcock it’s a certain that he added these shots as a playful reference. Chabrol liked playing cinematic games.

And Stéphane Audran is the Hitchcock Ice Blonde type, so it works.

This is very much a slow-burn thriller.

There isn’t much actual suspense, in fact hardly any. But there is a growing sense of dread. In that respect this movie perhaps functions more like a horror movie than a thriller.

Don’t think of this as a Hitchcock-style thriller. Just enjoy it as a Chabrol movie. It’s a very good Chabrol movie. Highly recommended.

The old Pathfinder DVD offers a perfectly acceptable 16:9 enhanced transfer. The availability of Chabrol’s movies in English-friendly versions has always been rather spotty.

I’ve also reviewed Chabrol’s fascinating but eccentric The Champagne Murders (1967) and the extremely interesting Innocents With Dirty Hands (1975).

The Champagne Murders (1967)

Claude Chabrol’s The Champagne Murders was shot simultaneously in two different versions, an English-language version and a French version (released as Le scandale). Interestingly none of the main players are dubbed in either version. They all (including Anthony Perkins) spoke both French and English fluently. Naturally the more pretentious online reviewers insist that the French version is superior, even if they’ve never actually seen it!

Given Chabrol’s admiration for Hitchcock and the initial setup of this movie you might be expecting this to be a Hitchcockian suspense thriller. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is not even a genuine suspense thriller, much less a Hitchcockian thriller. The plot is included more or less as an after-thought. There’s no suspense at all. This is more of a social comedy or a black comedy. A couple of years earlier Chabrol had made Blue Panther, a spy thriller which turns out not to be a spy thriller at all. It’s more of a demolition job on the spy genre and an elaborate cinematic game. This is to a large extent what Chabrol is doing to the suspense thriller genre in The Champagne Murders. Chabrol must have been immensely amused that most critics failed to get the joke.

This was Chabrol’s only Hollywood movie. It’s almost as if he wanted to make sure he would never be asked to make another movie in Hollywood.

The Champagne Murders begins with two friends, Paul (Maurice Ronet) and Christopher (Anthony Perkins), who pick up a young woman. They end up being beaten up and the young woman is murdered. Paul never really recovers his mental equilibrium and spends a long period in a mental hospital. He is released but his mental state is still a little shaky.

By this time Christopher has married into money. He has married Christine Belling (Yvonne Furneaux). Christine owns a vineyard, which had belonged to Paul’s family. In fact she owns a champagne empire and she has been offered a huge amount of money for it from two American buyers. The problem is that the business is worthless without the trade name and Paul still owns that. Christine has to persuade Paul to sell her the name. She wants Christopher’s help. If he’s a good boy and helps her she’ll buy him a yacht - a huge ocean-going yacht. Christopher likes boats.

Christopher and Paul make a business visit to Hamburg. Hamburg was at this time regarded as the sex and sin capital of Europe. While they’re there the body of a young woman, a lady of the night, is discovered.

Christine is always plotting something, and we get the feeling that often it’s for the sheer pleasure of manipulating people. She doesn’t seem to have a totally coherent objective in mind. Christopher may be doing some plotting as well. He thinks there’s something he wants but he doesn’t seem to know what it is. Paul is just increasingly confused. He thinks he may have done something terrible but he has no idea why he might have done such a thing. Paul’s grip on reality is steadily loosening.

The plot really only matters insofar as it sets up the situation Chabrol wants - a group of truly awful, fake, treacherous, manipulative people none of whom can be trusted and at least one of whom might be mad. All of them are so fake that they’re in danger of confusing their own fake personas with reality. Their personalities are not just fake but also fragmented. They lack any real sense of personal identity.

The performances are all slightly odd. This is clearly deliberate. When you look at the cast these are all very fine very experienced acting talents. If their performances are off-kilter that is obviously exactly what Chabrol wanted.

This is not a realist movie. This is one of the ways in which this film is most definitely not a Hitchcockian thriller. Hitchcock dealt with madness and obsession at times and his movies were often visually stylised but they never abandoned reality altogether. With The Champagne Murders we’re much more aware that we need to suspect that there are times when the movie may in fact have crossed the line into non-reality.

When looking at movies from other time periods it’s essential to remember that every decade has had its own distinctive cultural obsessions. The cultural obsessions of the mid-60s bear no resemblance whatsoever to the cultural obsessions of today. Trying to view a 1967 movie in terms of 2020s ideologies inevitably leads to a total misunderstanding of the movie.

You also have to bear in mind the intellectual climate of the 60s. Marxism, Freudianism, absurdism and existentialism were major intellectual currents at that time. They might not have directly influenced every film-maker but they were part of the atmosphere that intellectuals breathed. You can see traces of most of these intellectual currents in this movie.

There was much more consciousness of class. The protagonists of this movie very definitely belong to the decadent bourgeoisie. I don’t think Chabrol had any overt political axe to grind in this film, but in 1967 people would certainly have noticed the bourgeois milieu in which it takes place. Bored amoral rich people who have everything but still manage to be miserable.

Most modern critics still insist on seeing this movie as Chabrol attempting to do Hitchcock and failing. But while he admired Hitchcock he wasn’t trying to emulate Hitch here. Online reviews also insist on seeing this as a whodunit. At the end you do find out the murderer’s identity, which in a whodunit would be a satisfying conclusion. In this film it just raises more perplexing questions. The neat whodunit solution isn’t the point at all. The really interesting questions are left without neat tidy answers. If you’re looking for a conventional suspense thriller you’ll find this movie exasperating. It doesn’t obey any of the rules of the genre.

If you accept that Chabrol is teasing and toying with the viewer and if you enjoying cinematic game-playing you’ll have a much better time with The Champagne Murders. It’s still an oddball movie but it’s fascinating in its own way. The more you think about it after you’ve watched it the more fascinating it becomes. Recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray looks lovely and includes an audio commentary.

Innocents With Dirty Hands (1975)

Innocents With Dirty Hands (Les innocents aux mains sales) is a 1975 Claude Chabrol thriller.

The setup is so conventional and chichéd that we never seriously doubt that this is deliberate and that Chabrol has some surprises up his sleeve.

Julie (Romy Schneider) is married to Louis Wormser (Rod Steiger). He’s much older than her, he’s a self-pitying drunk and he can’t perform in the bedroom any more. Julie meets Jeff Marlo (Paolo Giusti), a handsome young aspiring writer. Julie reveals her unhappiness and sexual frustration to Jeff. Jeff takes immediate steps to solve her sexual frustration problems. Julie tells Jeff how very unhappy she is. She has to remain married to Louis because he’s rich but she’s very tired of him. If only some solution could be found to her problems.

You know where this is leading, and indeed pretty soon Julie and Jeff are planning a little accident for Louis. It’s basically The Postman Always Rings Twice but set among the decadent bourgeoisie. And of course the basic story has been done countless other times.

The night set for Louis’ accident arrives. They have decided that it would be wise for Jeff to slip over the border to Italy for a few days.

The police think they have a pretty good murder case. There are however some odd gaps in the police case, and the viewer will certainly notice these odd gaps. Certain things are assumed to have happened, but there’s no real proof. We start to suspect that there’s quite a lot that we don’t know.

Julie also starts to realise that there were some very important things that she didn’t know. And still doesn’t know.

The big plot twist at the midway point isn’t going to surprise anybody and I don’t think it was intended to. It’s the only possible explanation for certain events. I don’t think Chabrol was overly interested in the plot twists anyway. He was more interested in the psychological consequences of the plot twists. It’s the emotional twists that matter, not the narrative twists.

And Chabrol is much more interested in what happens after that major plot twist - it’s the actions that the characters take in response to the revelation that makes the movie start to become much more engrossing.

There’s a certain detachment to this movie. Chabrol isn’t trying to present us with a hero or a heroine with whom we’re going to empathise. He views their actions dispassionately. Audience members will have to decide if the actions of the characters are justified, and whether justice ever gets done. The police and the examining magistrate and Julie’s lawyer aren’t really sure either how justice would best be served and the law doesn’t care much either way.

Julie’s lawyer doesn’t think it makes much difference if she’s telling the truth or not. She’s beautiful so she’ll be believed anyway. And truth is whatever people happen to believe.

Romy Schneider is perhaps the movie’s biggest asset. She gives a complex performance. Julie is a woman whose motivations tend to shift, depending on her emotions and her sexual desires.

Rod Steiger is less hammy than usual.

Sex is pretty important in this movie. Not just sex as sex, but sex as it affects the mind and the heart as well as the body. The two main characters struggle to deal with sexual desires with which they’re not always comfortable. Love and sex make us do things we don’t want to do.

This isn’t an action-packed thrill-a-minute kind of thriller. It’s much more cerebral. What keeps us interested is that we never know for sure what the two central characters will do next, probably because they also don’t know what they’re going to do next.

If this is the kind of thriller you enjoy then you’ll be happy with this psychological study of love, hate, sex, murder, revenge, forgiveness and jealousy. Innocents With Dirty Hands turns out to be not at all the movie that it initially promised to be. It turns out to be a lot more interesting and it’s recommended.

The old Pathfinder Pictures DVD (from 2003) is letterboxed. The transfer is not dazzling but it’s acceptable and if you want to see this movie then it seems to be the only English-friendly option.