The funny thing is that Clouzot was not necessarily setting out to make anything so influential. After winning the top prize at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival with The Wages of Fear, a nail-biting existential thriller about desperate men driving trucks of nitroglycerin across the rough South American terrain, Clouzot sought to make a “small” film. In her capsule review of Diabolique in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Pauline Kael quotes Clouzot as saying, “I only sought to amuse myself and the little child who sleeps in all our hearts--the child who hides her head under the bedcovers and begs, ‘Daddy, Daddy, frighten me,’” which Kael amusing follows by writing, “Perhaps the dear little thing didn’t know what a coldblooded daddy she had.”

Coldblooded is certainly an apt description for Diabolique, which set the bar high in terms of both its murderous, yet sympathetic characters and its tense scenario that mixes the conventional thriller elements of lust, jealousy, and homicide with the possibility of supernatural horror. Producer Val Lewton and French expatriate director Jacques Tourneur had already experimented with mixing the visual and thematic tropes of film noir with supernatural terrors in films such as Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), but Clouzot heightened it in terms of both narrative tension and the introduction of something that we now take for granted: the twist ending.

Diabolique takes place primary at a provincial French boarding school lorded over by the brutish headmaster Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse). His fragile wife Christina (Véra Clouzot) suffers from a heart condition, and even though she is the school’s headmistress and owner (due to her family’s money), she is mostly passive in bearing the brunt of Michel’s cruelty. Her only support and solace come from a fellow teacher, Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret), who is also Michel’s mistress (in a plot development that could only come out of a French film, Christina is openly aware that Nicole and her husband are lovers, although the sexual element was actually toned down from the novel, where the two women are also lovers). Both Christina and Nicole are so fed up with Michel’s physical and emotional abuse that they decide to murder him by luring him out the small village where Nicole lives, drugging him, and drowning him in the bathtub. Nicole, who is as confident and aggressive as Christina is mousy and reserved, is the driving force behind the plot, but it requires both of them to succeed (dead bodies are awfully heavy, after all). Their plan works, although not without a few tense moments of near revelation before they manage to dump Michel’s body in the school swimming pool, where they hope it will be found the next morning with conclusions being drawn that he got drunk and drowned.

However, the next morning the body is missing, and various things start happening to suggest that either (1) someone who knows what they were up to stole the body and is trying to blackmail them, (2) Michel was never really dead in the first place, or (3) Michel’s ghost is terrorizing them. None of the three possibilities offers much respite, and both women begin to crack under the strain of what they have done. Being the stronger of the two, Nicole is better at keeping her head and not panicking (at least not openly), but Christina, with her heavy conscience and weak heart, starts coming closer and closer to a complete breakdown. The bleakness of the film’s plot and its concomitant despairing view of humanity is lightened around the edges by the colorful supporting cast of characters, including the passively grumbling teachers at the school and a retired police detective played by Charles Vanel who takes it upon himself to solve the mystery of Michel’s disappearance, much to the chagrin of the increasingly paranoid women who murdered (or tried to murder) him.

Jaded viewers today might be adept enough at reading the clues to intuit what is going on, but most will be duly shocked by the film’s final images, which bring it fully into the realm of horror while also forcing you to go back and rethink everything you just saw. Viewers in the mid-1950s who hadn’t experienced decades of cinematic twist endings were stunned by the film’s eventual revelations, and Clouzot was witty and wise enough to end the film with an open request that viewers resist the urge to tell their friends what happens and hence ruin the experience. But, even if you do know what happens, Diabolique offers a host of dark pleasures, including the superb cinematography by Armand Thirard, which makes the French countryside seem like a haven for perversity and rottenness; Clouzot’s cool, assured direction that makes the contrived material feel so genuine and absorbing; and the performances by Signoret, Clouzot, and Meurisse, who form a particularly twisted love/hate triangle. While the burning question of “What happened to the body?” certainly keeps the film taut, it is watching the two women’s discordant reactions to the turn of events that makes it so intriguing. In a sense, Diabolique is really a character study, forcing its two sympathetic, but morally compromised protagonists beneath the cinematic microscope and watching them squirm and, possibly, collapse. Coldblooded, indeed. You can see why Hitch was so jealous.

Copyright ©2011 James Kendrick

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