MAGNET contributing editor Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 100 titles—from the ’30s through the ’70s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every Friday.
Diabolique (1955, in French with English subtitles, 116 minutes)
When the wife and the mistress of a misogynistic French schoolmaster retrieve a large wicker trunk from the attic, then stuff a waterproof tablecloth and a doctored bottle of liquor into it, you get the feeling they’re not just planning a picnic in the country. A harrowing thriller that borrows some of its best elements from Alfred Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 masterpiece Diabolique in turn influenced Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho. It’s obvious, too, that Diabolique must have been studied long and hard by the Coen brothers before they shot their first feature, Blood Simple, in 1984.
Resembling then-current U.S. TV star Jack Webb (Dragnet), arrogant school principal Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse) believes in equal treatment for women: He bullies them all, even forcing himself on his fragile wife, Christina (Vera Clouzot, the director’s spouse), who has a heart condition and is contemplating divorce. The next morning, she has to carefully navigate around her snoring husband to locate a missing shoe before gaining her freedom. Delassalle’s bit on the side, the impulsive Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret, later to sizzle with Laurence Harvey in Room At The Top), has a plan for a more permanent solution to the ladies’ problems.
As an unofficial signpost to the end of the film-noir era, the black-and-white camera work here by Armand Thirard is exquisite, lots of crisscross shadows, eerily lit rooms and overloaded bookcases full of mysterious objects—some of it photographed from a bird’s-eye shooting angle.
“A man who runs after his wife looks ridiculous,” snaps Delassalle when he tracks down Christina in Nicole’s country flat after a 10-hour drive from the private school he rules with an iron fist. All she can do is clutch at her heart in fear and back away. When Delassalle goes missing, Alfred Fichet (Charles Vanel), a retired police inspector keeping his hand in, volunteers his services to the distraught wife. Much like the policeman in Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment, Fichet plays the good cop to get closer to a “person of interest.”
The kids at the school, like those in Laurent Cantet’s uber-realistic 2008 film The Class, are all but out of control. The best student athlete, however, volunteers to dive into a filthy swimming pool to retrieve Nicole’s keys and comes up, instead, with Delassalle’s cigarette lighter. The pool, Christina and Nicole decide, must be drained. Just like Janet Leigh did for motel shower-curtains, after squirming through Diabolique, you may never again feel the overpowering urge to take a bath late at night in a deserted house. Or jump into a murky, weed-infested pool, even in broad daylight.
