art in all its forms

art in all its forms

11/25/10

***TONIGHT: Les Diaboliques @ studiofilmclub


FROM THE ORGANISERS:


Thursday November 25th TONIGHT!
FREE!
doors open at 7:30pm and films will start at 8:15pm

After last weeks film about Henri-Georges Clouzot's aborted masterpiece INFERNO we bring you his existing one... Les Diaboliques

Les Diaboliques (Henri Georges-Clouzot/France/1954/116') 

Legend has it that Henri-Georges Clouzot beat out Alfred Hitchcock to secure the rights to this novel, which proved to be a veritable blueprint for an icy masterpiece of murder, mystery and suspense. Afterwards, the story goes a fellow told Alfred Hitchcock that after his daughter saw Psycho she refused to take a shower and that after she saw Diabolique she refused to get in a bathtub. Well, Hitchcock said, send her to the dry cleaners.
Véra Clouzot plays the sickly wife of a callous headmaster of a provincial boarding school going to seed, and the commanding Simone Signoret is the headmaster's mistreated mistress. Together they plot and carry out his murder, a brutal drowning that director Clouzot documents in chilly detail, but the corpse disappears and a nosy detective starts sniffing around the grounds as threatening notes taunt the women. Clouzot's thriller is as precise and accomplished a work as anything in Hitchcock's canon, a film of gruelling suspense and startling shocks in an overcast, grey world of decay. Some have accused the film of being misanthropic, and Clouzot's attitude toward his characters is bitter at best, contemptuous at worst. The viewer is left on the outside looking in, but the razor precision and terrifying twists deliver a sleek, bleak spectacle absolutely worthy of attention.The end caption of the film pleads with the audience not to reveal the ending of the film to any of their friends,a truly influential, intelligent, and unforgettable film. 

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