MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Der Rabe [de])

France 1943
d: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Film Office (Region 2 fr)

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David Thomson calls Clouzot's a 'cinema of total disenchantment'. This exposé of a malicious small town in France must be one of the most depressed films to emerge from the period of the German Occupation: everyone speaks badly of everyone else, rumours of abortion and drug addiction are rife, and a flood of poison-pen letters raises the spiteful hysteria to epidemic level. Clouzot's misanthropy concludes in total defeat; his naggingly over-insistent style occasionally achieves a great blackness.
— CPe, Time Out Film Guide
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Much of the film’s style and content will be readily familiar to noir lovers everywhere. Though—unlike later examples of the genre—"Le Corbeau" has comparatively few scenes set at night, this doesn’t prevent Clouzot from exploiting hard-edged compositions featuring stark contrasts between light and darkness (the last shot, for example, of the black figure going down the sunny street), dramatically exaggerated shadows (Vorzet’s figure on the stairway wall tips its hat to Germain and says good night), and even, at one dramatic high point, a bare light bulb swinging freely in a dark room—not, however, a police station or a cheap hotel, but a school classroom. Such noir elements are coupled in "Le Corbeau" with traits characteristic of works made under the occupation: the small town in the provinces, virtually cut off from the outside and serving as a microcosm of human society; the remarkable passages of subjective sound mixing; striking images of immobility, as when the congregation sits transfixed while a letter drops through a silent church. ...
But probably the most unusual aspect of the film, generically, historically, and in the context of Clouzot’s work, is the way in which it stages a properly philosophical debate about the effects of the German occupation. For clearly, as many observers have noted, the anonymous letters that plague the town of St. Robin create a situation much like that of France under the occupation.
— Alan Williams, Criterion
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The feel of oppressive evil and paranoia in "Le Corbeau" is all-consuming, and it conveys the feeling of living in a society where everyone is being watched, where innocuous acts are suspicious, where love seems to be a trap for the most poisonous bitterness, and in which all standards of society and decency seem to be collapsing.
— Roderick Heath, brightlightsfilm November 2005

Quai des Orfèvres

(Unter falschem Verdacht [de])

France 1947
d: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Film Office (Region 2 fr)

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It's unfortunate that "The Wages of Fear" is virtually the only Clouzot film that anyone remembers, since his real background lies in a much more traditional French thriller vein, of which "Quai des Orfèvres" is a fine example. The plot is suitably marginal: a hard-times couple (Blier, Delair) whose marriage is crumbling find themselves implicated in a murder. Clouzot doesn't waste a moment over the rampant implausibilities, but devotes all his energies to a romantically bleak evocation of the low-life settings: run-down music-halls, squalid apartments and gloomy police stations, peopled with lonely hookers, lesbians and pornographers. Jouvet's Maigret-esque cop gets all the best lines, and gives the film its human, tragic focus.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
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The skillful writer-director Henri-Georges Clouzot is mainly known for his corrosive misanthropy. Yet surprisingly, this accomplished 1947 noir turns that misanthropy precisely on its head without ever resorting to sentimentality or stereotypes. The milieus of a seedy music hall and police station in Paris are delineated with such richness and attentiveness toward the postoccupation climate that when the murder of a licentious film producer brings a police inspector (the great Louis Jouvet) into the music hall, Clouzot is able to reveal a complex and interactive working-class world in which cops and criminals are sometimes difficult to tell apart. The principal epiphanies in this tale emerge from Jouvet's expressions of kinship with a flirtatious singer (Suzy Delair) and a lesbian photographer (Simone Renant), but there are also memorable portraits of the singer's mousy pianist husband (Bernard Blier), a music publisher (Henri Arius), and several others.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
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Given both his hubris and his cynicism, then, the most surprising aspect of Quai is its tenderness toward almost every character, an unsentimental love born of sympathetic understanding, which had this viewer in tears by the end—a first for a crime picture, certainly. ... "Quai des Orfèvres", which accepts and embraces the world while pretending to sneer at it, is as rich and deep and wily and teeming as a 400-page classic novel, and it demands to be seen again and again.
— Luc Sante

Le Salaire de la peur

(Lohn der Angst [de])

France 1953
d: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Criterion (Region 0 us)

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An existential thriller - the most original and shocking French melodrama of the fifties. The opening sequence shows us a verminous South American village and the Europeans trapped in it; they will risk everything to get out. Four of them take the job of driving two truckloads of nitroglycerine over three hundred miles of primitive roads. Their varied responses to the grueling test of driving the trucks reveal their characters, but when you can be blown up at any moment only a fool believes that character determines fate. In this situation, courage and caution are almost irrelevant, and ordinary human responses are futile and archaic - yet nothing else is left. If this isn't a parable of man's position in the modern world, it's at least an illustration of it. Clouzot's most controversial film, it is also his most powerful; the violence is not used simply for excitement - it's used as in Eisenstein's and Bunuel's films: to force a vision of human experience. Grand Prix at Cannes.
— Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
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Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 suspense classic, about four doomed out-of-work Europeans (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli, Peter Van Eyck) trapped in a squalid South American village exploited by a U.S. oil company, who agree to drive two truckloads of nitroglycerine over 300 miles of primitive roads in exchange for $2,000 each—if they survive. When this existentialist shocker opened in the U.S., 43 minutes had been hacked away, but the gripping adventure elements left intact were still enough to turn the film into a hit. A significant influence on Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch", this grueling pile driver of a movie will keep you on the edge of your seat, though it reeks of French 50s attitude, which includes misogyny, snobbishness, and borderline racism. It's also clearly a love story between two men (Montand and Vanel).
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
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The entire journey, in fact, is a primer in what Clouzot and Alfred Hitchcock understood above all others—and something I always felt that I, as a budding novelist, learned at their knees: that tension exists in the absence of shock, in the suggestion of dire possibility, as opposed to any presentation of calamity, which often ends up looking rather pedestrian. After the boulder, there is a pool of oil to drive through, in which Mario, determined not to get stuck, purposefully crushes the leg of Jo, who is guiding him . . . and still gets stuck. As each crisis is averted, the toll on the men’s nerves (particularly Jo’s) grows worse. It’s a refreshingly authentic concept—that exposure to terror does not make one less fearful, as most heroic films purport, but more so. You can’t conquer fear, only temporarily elude it. So each encounter represents merely another wink from Death. But the four men know all too well that Death, sooner or later, will open his eyes.
— Dennis Lehane

Les Diaboliques

(Die Teuflischen [de])

France 1955
d: Henri-Georges Clouzot
René Château Vidéo / TF1 Vidéo (Region 2 fr)

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Headstrong mistress (Signoret) and retiring wife (Clouzot) conspire to murder the man they share, a tyrannical headmaster of a seedy boarding-school whose curriculum offers nothing but stagnation and decay. But in this black world (where, ironically, only the dead comes to life) everyone is in the end a victim, and their actions operate like snares setting traps that leave them grasping for survival. The camera watches these clammy proceedings with a cold precision that relishes its neutrality. At least one source claims that all Clouzot's films were shot in an atmosphere of bitterness and recrimination. It shows. But in this case it makes for a great piece of Guignol misanthropy.
— CPe, Time Out Film Guide
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Clouzot does it, all right; his Grand Guignol techniques are so calculatedly grisly that they seem silly, yet they succeed in making one feel queasy and sordid and scared.
— Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies
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"... prior to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Clouzot’s eerie masterwork was considered the most frightening and artistic horror picture ever made. In fact, just as Hitchcock was a major influence on France’s master of suspense, Hitchcock admitted an equal debt to Clouzot, and not just because they had similar disrespect for actors (whereas Hitchcock called them 'cattle,' martinet Clouzot called them 'instruments'). Not only can we see traces of Psycho throughout Diabolique—note the many similar plot elements and story twists, suspense devices, shocks, quirky characters, and morbid humor—but Hitchcock even borrowed Clouzot’s successful ploy of insisting no one be admitted to theaters once the film began. ... As always, his film is strongly acted, strikingly paced for tension and suspense, and exhibits a perverse nastiness of character and environment that is oppressive and unsettling. It is a film where the heroine—the nicest person in the story—plans a cold-blooded murder; an entire scene at the school centers around the serving and eating of spoiled fish (rumor has it that the director actually made his actors eat the fish so they’d better understand the nature of the school and the characters); the dilapidated school, rowdy boys, and terrible teachers are a matched set; and where water, a symbol of purity and birth/life, is equated with death (as in Psycho). Diabolique is most definitely the work of an angry artist who spent several years of his adult life in sanitariums recovering from his illness but not his cynicism."
— Danny Peary, Criterion
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... the suspense that has been built up is dissipated in a virtuoso display of plot-twisting, which leaves the audience reeling, but destroys the credibility of all that has gone before.
— Roy Armes, French Cinema
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On a voulu voir longtemps dans Les Diaboliques, que les scènes d'horreur, l'orchestration de la peur par une mise en scène 'coup de poing'. Mais il y a aussi le réalisme psychologique noir, qui, dès Le Corbeau, fut un signe distinctif du cinéaste, de sa misanthropie, de ses doutes sur la nature humaine et de son gout des situations troubles.
— Jacques Siclier