A second-rate boys’ boarding school in Paris is run by the tyrannical and cruel Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse). The school, however, is owned by Delassalle’s wife, Christina (Véra Clouzot, the film director’s wife), a wealthy, devout Catholic émigrée from Venezuela who works there as a Spanish teacher. The frail Christina suffers from a chronic heart condition. Despite Christina’s unstable health, Michel subjects her to significant emotional abuse, humiliating and mocking her, as well as mistreating the students. He also carries on an extramarital relationship with Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret), another teacher at the school, whom he physically abuses. Rather than antagonism, Christina and Nicole have a somewhat close relationship, appartently based on their apparent mutual hatred of Michel. Unable to stand his mistreatment any longer, Nicole devises a plan to murder him. Though hesitant at first, Christina ultimately consents to help Nicole. Using a threatened divorce to lure Michel to Nicole’s apartment building, Christina sedates him with laced wine before the two women drown him in a bathtub. Concealing his body in a trunk, the women drive back to the school, where they dump his corpse in the school’s unused swimming pool. When his corpse floats to the top, they think it will appear to have been an accident. Almost everything goes according to their plans until the body fails to surface. Michel’s corpse is nowhere to be found when the pool is drained.
Co-written and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Les Diaboliques (released as Diabolique in the United States and variously translated as The Devils or The Fiends) won the title of Best Foreign Film of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review. By late 1956, it had become the highest-grossing French film released in the United States. It is also one of the most successful queer films of all time since, although queer coded, something is clearly going on between Christina and Nicole!
The film was NOT submitted to the Hays Office and was distributed by Cinédis WITHOUT a seal of approval.
Based on the 1952 novel The One Who Was No More by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Clouzot, after finishing The Wages of Fear in 1953, optioned the screenplay rights, preventing Alfred Hitchcock from making the film. Nevertheless, the film helped inspire Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Robert Bloch, the author of the novel Psycho, stated in an interview that this was his all-time favorite horror film. Ironically, Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo is also based on a novel by Boileau and Naecejac. Les Diaboliques went on to garner a reputation as a classic film with significant influence on the horror genre, particularly due to its twist ending – no spoilers here!.
With Charles Vanel as the detective.
Cinematography: Armand Thirard.
Cinédis
