Clip (translated): What you staring at? Nothing.
David Hast: Scott, have you seen Diabolique?
Scott Vander Werf: I have seen Diabolique, I had not seen it years ago even though I had heard about it – because I knew that Alfred Hitchcock was influenced by the film – with one of my favorite films, Psycho.
DH: Yeah, that’s a backstory to this movie, this is a 1955 French thriller and psychological horror story from the director, French director Henri Georges Clouzot who also made Wages of Fear, a very famous French action movie, right?
SVW: Yes, that was remade as Sorcerer in the 1970s. They're both great movies, but Wages of Fear is one of my favorite movies of all time.
DH: Well, we'll have to do a show on that one. Yeah, this movie, Diabolique or Diabolical, is film noir-ish in parts. It's very Hitchcockian and definitely French. And it was influential on Hitchcock. We can maybe talk a little later about how Hitchcock actually tried to get the rights to this, but Clouzot beat him to it, and then Hitchcock later on did something else. But this did influence Hitchcock and some of the stuff in Psycho. So what this movie is, we have three main characters. Michel, he is the principal of a private boarding school in France, Christina is his wife and she actually is the one who owns it. It was her family's property. And right from the start, it's completely out in the open that he's been having this affair with one of the teachers, Nicole. But Nicole tells Christina that the affair is over now. This is like in the first or second scene of the movie. And the two women seem to actually get along okay, which is French. In that first scene, Nicole's wearing sunglasses. And we see it's because she's hiding a black eye that Michel, this principal of school, gave her. So he's abusive towards her. But we also see him being really badly, openly abusive to his poor wife, Christina, who seems she's really kind of timid and vulnerable. And they do that with the costumes and stuff. She wears braids, so it makes her look more like a little girl and she's always wearing this checkered dress and later in movie she's wearing this white nightgown that they light brightly. So it's like she has a spotlight on her and she's kind of weak and vulnerable for various reasons. And Michel is just this awful person. He never stops attacking Christina, his wife. He attacks her emotionally, physically, and sexually. We see all this horrible stuff that he does to her. And even calls her “a ruin” because she has a heart condition.
SVW: And then he's also really terrible to the students. He's very abusive, verbally abusive to the other teachers. There's only two other teachers along with his mistress.
DH: Right. we, yeah, he does. He holds back on food or wine for the teachers. You know, this is France, right? He should be able to have a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. He's just stingy and nasty, punishes students. So nobody likes him, right? And then we find out, and this is just
not even 10 minutes into the movie, that Christina and Nicole, his wife and his mistress, are plotting to murder him. And they've been apparently talking about it before, and now they're talking about going through with it. So we're not going to say anymore, even though this is just setting it up. You know, the movie goes on to show what they do and what happens, but this movie has unbelievable, unexpected surprises. In fact, after the movie ends, after it says “The End,” a message comes on the screen begging the audience not to give the way to the ending to people who haven't seen it.
SVW: Yes. So we really encourage you to watch this movie, but don't read anything online about it.
DH: Yeah. And we're just not, we're not going to spoil it for you because it's all about the surprise ending and multiple surprises before that.
SVW: And one of the things that's interesting too about the movie and the way that, that, that, uh, has the atmosphere is this private school, you say, it's a private school, but there's something about it that's just a little off. It's a private school that looks like it's struggling. The architecture is very large, but it's also sort of run down in a way. It's very ornate. It's very Gothic, like in a true sort of Gothic type of a novel or movie.
DH: Yeah, apparently this was kind of a real phenomenon in France at the time, and I'm sure earlier, that there were these private boarding schools, often for very wealthy children, right? The children of wealthy people. But the schools themselves were kind of run in a very unpleasant way for the kids. I guess parents thought that was okay.
SVW: And then the fact that there's only these, if you include the principal, four teachers for this amount of students, because there's a lot of students in the school. And you can also see that there's a lot of different grades because there's different ages of the students.
DH: Yeah, yeah. the students are just, you know, they’re a little bit wild. The teachers are yelling at them. most important of all is that clearly a lot of the bad stuff there is just because of the way this Michel runs it. An interesting backstory to this is the Hitchcock thing. That Hitchcock tried to get the rights and then when he couldn’t, apparently, he greatly admired this film. In fact, Hitchcock fairly, didn't really think there meant anyone else was his equal as a director of suspense. But he did think Clouzot was pretty great. He admired this film in particular.
SVW: And there's also a back and forth between the two directors because Clouseau is also influenced by Hitchcock and this movie was made after Rear Window and he was very much a fan of Rear Window and you can see that in some of the sequences around the boarding school, the way that people are looking out windows and what they see when they're looking out windows.
DH: I hadn't even thought of that. That's true. There is that kind of voyeuristic aspect to it like in Rear Window. And the movie that often is mentioned along with Rare Window because Hitchcock made it right around, he made one after the other, is Vertigo.
SVW: Which is also a marriage movie.
DH: Yeah, and Vertigo, many people consider to be Hitchcock's greatest film, a lot of critics anyway. That is by the same French writing team that wrote this movie, one that made this movie. When Hitchcock couldn't get the rights to Diabolique, he...made sure to get the rights to that those guys next novel and he made that into Vertigo.
SVW: The novel that Le Does Diabolics was based on is She Who Was No More is the English translation. And then of course when Hitchcock went on and made Psycho he adapted the novel by Robert Block, the great American horror science fiction and fantasy writer.
DH: Yeah and Psycho is another movie right where Hitchcock and the producers you know distributors implored people not to give away the surprises, of which there are two or three big ones, including the ending. And there's a lot, actually a number of things in common between Psycho and this movie, but we won't get into details or else we'll start giving away this movie. What'd you think of the look of this film?
SVW: I thought the look was fantastic. Again, there's a Gothic aspect to it, a noir-ish aspect to it as well. It's black and white in the way that it's lit is gorgeous at times but also very it gives you the atmospheric malevolence that's going on in different sequences as well.
DH: In some of the you know, A lot of it's just shot high-key bright, know, it's just daylight Out exterior daylights or it's just the classrooms nothing exceptional But when it gets into the scary stuff, it's usually night and that's when you get into this lighting that's very horror movie or noir-ish kind of lighting and then the way they they light Christina is always fascinating too because even though we may be seeing lots of shadow and darkness and just slashes of light, it seems like every time we see her, it's like there's a spotlight on her.
SVW: And she's glowing, as you've mentioned. And you know, the other thing that's interesting in terms of just the setting is the movie begins with a truck moving through Paris, but it's obviously not the Paris that is romantically portrayed in movies. It's just the every in a sense, everyday Paris or even the kind of rundown Paris. And when the truck eventually arrives at its destination, it's this boarding house that again, when it's the daylight sequences, it looks particularly run down. It's in and it’s in the other sequences. There's some there's some moments in it where the characters leave Paris. And again, they're not going to any place that's luxurious. It's all the sort of everyday lower class type of France.
DH: Right, right. Yeah, that opening scene when he's driving the truck, it's Michel, the horrible principal, the one they're going to murder. And he drives the truck up to the school and drives through a puddle of water and runs over like a paper boat that one of the students has left in there, which people have pointed out as symbolic. So right from the start, he's destroying things that are the children's things. Yeah, it's interesting how she's so vulnerable and the spotlight is so on her. You might think, oh, we're going to not like her either because she's kind of pathetic, but it's not like that at all, right? We as the viewer, she's the one we really sympathize with, Christina, the wife. And when bad things happen and she's terrified, we're terrified along with her. And when she decides to kill her husband 10 minutes into the movie, we're kind of like, yeah.
SVW: Well, and that's one of those mechanisms in suspense films where you know somebody is actually planning to do something bad, but you, it's not that you root for them, but then when they get into a situation where they may get caught, you suddenly are like anxious. You know, get that sort of feeling of anxiousness as if you're rooting for them.
DH: Yeah. And certainly the director does everything he can to make you dislike the husband. Oh, one more thing we should point out about Vera Clouseau, the actress who plays Christine is
She was the director Henri Clouzot’s wife and I think she only did like three movies or something. This is the movie she's famous for.
SVW: There's one other character that's very central in the movie and that's inspector Fichet.
DH: Oh of course we forgot to talk about him. Go ahead.
SVW: He's a retired detective and but one of the things that's really interesting is that he seems to be a direct inspiration for Peter Fox Colombo.
DH: Yeah I think I don't know if Fox ever said anything directly to acknowledge it but it’s clear. It's clear. He's this guy in a trench coat and he chews on his cigar and he acts like he's stupid and repeats questions. All the stuff that Columbo did in that TV series.
SVW: So if you're a fan of thrillers, of psychological horror movies, if you love great old black and white films that use the visuals and paint a picture for you, this is definitely a movie to see.
DH: And if you like...Colombo, if you like Peter Fox Colombo, that kind of stuff. Yeah.
SVW: Thank you.
DH: Thank you.
