La Prisonnière (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1968)

Laurent Terzieff in La Prisonnière

Cast: Laurent Terzieff, Elisabeth Wiener, Bernard Fresson, Dany Carrel, Dario Moreno, Claude Piéplu, Noëlle Adam, Michel Etcheverry. Screenplay: Henri-Georges Clouzot, Monique Lange, Marcel Moussy. Cinematography: Andréas Winding. Production design: Jacques Saulnier. Film editing: Noëlle Balenci.   

La Prisonnière (aka Woman in Chains) was Henri-Georges Clouzot's last film, but in many ways it feels more dated the ones he made a decade earlier, the classic The Wages of Fear (1953) and Diabolique (1955). It's about a couple, Josée (Elisabeth Wiener) and Gilbert (Bernard Fresson) in an "open" relationship that actually seems to be open only on his side. He's an artist, working with visual effects and geometric sculpture, preparing for an exhibition of op art and kinetic art in a gallery owned by Stanislas Hassler (Laurent Terzieff). His preparation includes sleeping with a prominent woman art critic, which Josée tolerates grudgingly. Meanwhile, she becomes involved with Stanislas, which stirs Gilbert's jealousy. She visits Stanislas in his apartment over his gallery, where he puts on a slide show of some of the works in his collection, one of which is a photograph of a nude woman in chains. Josée's curiosity is aroused, in part because she's a film editor working on a documentary about abused women. The photographer is Stanislas himself, and she lets herself be persuaded to watch him photograph one of his models. Josée reacts with a mixture of revulsion and desire. Unfortunately Wiener is not up to the demands of the role: As she tries to portray a woman breaking free from conventional morality, she looks dithery and awkward. Stanislaus taunts Josée that she's a bourgeoise (which the subtitle inadequately translates as "housewife"), and his bullying begins to break down her resistance: She becomes an active participant in his shoots and falls completely in love with him, with disastrous results. One problem with the film is that the depiction of Stanislas's sadomasochism feels timid: We've seen much more disturbing images than these, of topless women in mildly tortured poses, "glamour porn" at worst. (Luis Buñuel gave us more convincing perversity a year earlier in Belle de Jour.) Clouzot seems to be trying to make both a fable about repression and liberation and a cutting satire of the art world of the 1960s, but he fails to make the two aims coalesce.   

Le Corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943)

Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc in Le Corbeau

Cast: Pierre Fresnay, Ginette Leclerc, Micheline Francey, Héléna Manson, Jeanne Fusier-Gir, Sylvie, Liliane Maigné, Pierre Larquey, Noël Roquevert, Bernard Lancret, Antoine Balpêtré, Jean Brochard. Screenplay: Louis Chavance, Henri-Georges Clouzot. Cinematography: Nicolas Hayer. Set decoration: Andrej Andrejew. Film editing: Marguerite Beaugé. Music: Tony Aubin.

No film that has something to offend everyone can be all bad, right? Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Corbeau was made during the German occupation of France, and it managed to alienate both the Vichy regime and the Resistance, and even to be banned after the liberation. To be sure, it's a somewhat unpleasant film, a psychological thriller in which almost everyone is something of a rotter. But at the time, it was subjected to suspicion of being a kind of allegory of the situation in which France's towns found themselves, to be an attack on informing on one's fellow citizens and an undermining of the morale of the populace. Someone in the unnamed village where the film takes place is sending anonymous poison-pen letters to everyone else, exposing the secrets and sins of the townspeople, but especially aiming at Dr. Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay), a fairly recent arrival to the town, accusing him of being an illegal abortionist. The letters are signed "Le Corbeau," the crow (or if you prefer an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe, the raven). Germain himself is not an altogether likable character: He's a bit crabby and he's carrying on an affair with both the beautiful wife (Micheline Francey) of the local psychiatrist, Dr. Vorzet (Pierre Larquey), a much older man, and with Denise Saillens (Ginette Leclerc), who sometimes fakes illness to get Germain's attention. The vicious letters cause an uproar, in the middle of which a young man commits suicide. Uncovering the identity of Le Corbeau becomes a pursuit that is doomed not to end well. Clouzot's skill as a director, abetted by cinematographer Nicolas Hayer's manipulation of light and shadow, makes all of this unpleasantness watchable, but it's easy to see why it got under people's skin.

The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)

With John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear forms an unholy trinity of adventure films. All three are about soldiers of fortune in Latin American countries seen as ripe for the pickings by predatory outsiders. Clouzot's film is probably the most deeply cynical of the three: Houston at least lets two of his adventurers survive, and Peckinpah's bunch at least shows some sympathy for the exploited poor. But from the opening of Clouzot's film, in which a half-naked child is seen tormenting some cockroaches (a scene Peckinpah borrowed for his film's opening), we are in hell. The unnamed country is being plundered by the Southern Oil Company, known by the acronym SOC, pronounced "soak." The S and the O, however, suggest Esso, the old trademark of Standard Oil before it and Mobil morphed into the double anonymity of Exxon. An oil well is on fire 300 miles away from the SOC headquarters, which lie on the outskirts of an impoverished village, and the easiest way to deal with the fire is to seal it off with explosives. So the foreman at the headquarters, Bill O'Brien (William Tubbs), proposes sending a couple of trucks cross-country, laden with nitroglycerin. Union drivers would balk at such dangerous work, so the company hires some of the local layabouts: Mario (Yves Montand), a swaggering Corsican; Jo (Charles Vanel), a French gangster from Paris; Luigi (Folco Lulli), an Italian who has just learned that he has a terminal lung illness from his work handling cement for SOC; and Bimba (Peter van Eyck), a German who survived forced labor in a salt mine under the Nazis. All three have been idling in the village waiting for the big break that will allow them to leave, and this seems to be it. Desperation at getting out is so intense that one of the men who vie for the job commits suicide after he fails to land it. The journey is, to say the least, harrowing, and Clouzot, who adapted the screenplay with Jérôme Géronimi from a novel by Georges Arnaud, makes the most of every nail-biting moment of it. As a director, Clouzot is as smart in what he chooses not to show us and in what he does. Jo, for example, is not the first choice as a driver: O'Brien goes with a younger man. But when that man doesn't show up on the morning of departure, Jo takes his place. We don't see what Jo did to eliminate or delay his rival, but we're sure it wasn't good. And when one of the trucks explodes, we don't see the buildup to or the cause of the explosion: We witness it from a distance, and then join the surviving truck drivers as they come upon the scene, which they treat as just another hazardous obstacle on the road. The Wages of Fear was heavily cut on its first American release: The portrayal of American capitalism didn't sit well in the era of HUAC investigations. Clouzot's nihilism in The Wages of Fear sometimes feels a little heavy: One character actually dies with the word "nothing" on his lips. The screenplay for The Wages of Fear lacks the polished wit of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which also contains the great performances of Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and the undervalued Tim Holt. And The Wild Bunch displays Peckinpah's great narrative drive and unequaled handling of action sequences. But Clouzot's film easily belongs in their company, and its uncompromising darkness makes many think it the best of the three.

The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1942)

Henri-Georges Clouzot is best-known today for the chilling Diabolique (1955) and the nail-biter The Wages of Fear (1953), but his first feature was a comedy-mystery somewhat in the manner of The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934). In The Murderer Lives at Number 21, police inspector Wenceslas Vorobechik (Pierre Fresnay), known as Wens, sets out to solve a series of murders in which the killer leaves a calling card: Monsieur Durand. Eventually, he is aided (and occasionally stymied) by his mistress, Mila Milou (Suzy Delair), who gets involved in the case because she thinks the celebrity of bringing the killer to justice would help her nascent career as a singer and actress. Clouzot made the film for a company backed by the occupying German forces, who wanted films to replace American imports. The movie shows no sign of Nazi propaganda, and there are those who claim that Clouzot inserted subtle anti-German jokes into the film. It was based on a novel by Stanislas-André Steenman, who worked on the screenplay with Clouzot, who brought the characters of Wens and Mila over from an earlier short film. Wens and Mila have a relationship somewhat reminiscent of Nick and Nora Charles, although no Thin Man film ever contained a scene like the one in which Mila squeezes out the blackheads on Wens's face -- a gratuitous bit that is presumably designed to show the intimacy of their relationship. Compared to Clouzot's later work, it's a slight but amusing movie, enlivened by the oddball inhabitants of the boarding house at No. 21 Avenue Junot that Wens moves into, disguising himself as a clergyman, after he receives a tip that the murderer lives there.

Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

Diabolique (or Les Diaboliques) was probably one of the first foreign language films I ever saw (although I'm sure I must have seen it in a version dubbed into English, as most U.S. releases were back then). The only thing I retained from it, I'm afraid, is the surprise ending. So I'm glad to say that it holds up after all these years, as any good thriller must even when you know its twists. I am, for the record, not one who is spoiled by "spoilers": I knew the gimmick in The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) before I saw it, and I like to think I appreciated it more because I could see how it was being set up, and I enjoyed The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) more the second time I watched it. To my mind, any good thriller with a twist has to work independently of that twist, which Diabolique does. What it has going for it especially is Clouzot's superb control of atmosphere: sets (Léon Barsacq), music (Georges Van Parys), cinematography (Armand Thirard), and of course the performances of Véra Clouzot as Christina, Simone Signoret as Nicole, Paul Meurisse as Michel, Charles Vanel as Fichet, and a gallery of mildly grotesque supporting players, all working together to create a thoroughly sordid and unpleasant but also hypnotizing milieu. Even before the murder takes place, I was seriously creeped out by the shabby old school, its rowdy boys and ratty staff, and the sadism displayed by Michel toward his wife and mistress. That said, the story doesn't entirely hold together in any dispassionate post-viewing analysis. Without giving away any of the film's secrets, I spotted numerous loose threads. To name one, why is Christina so insistent on not divorcing Michel when she's perfectly willing to go along with a plot to murder him? We are expected to believe that she's a devout Catholic with religious scruples against divorce, but surely the church is at least as much against murdering your husband as it is against divorcing him. But I'm perfectly happy to ignore the implausible when the movie is as gripping as this one is.