Our Director’s Showcase in October celebrates the work of legendary French director Henri-Georges Clouzot with 5 of his very best works.
Our Director’s Showcase in October celebrates the work of legendary French director Henri-Georges Clouzot with 5 of his very best works.
Clouzot made his directorial debut in 1942 and, although he only completed 11 full length feature films before his death in 1977, he’s regarded as one of the great French directors. A master of the suspense thriller genre, his work is filled with dark, psychological overtones, black humour, plot twists and themes exploring jealousy, infidelity, revenge, murder and greed.
A contemporary of Alfred Hitchcock, Clouzot was the one director to give the “master of suspense” a run for his money, and his title. Two of the films screening in our series, and perhaps Clouzot’s best known works, Wages of Fear (1953), and Les Diaboliques (1955), were of interest to both directors, with Hitchcock and Clouzot seeking rights to the original material.
Hitchcock missed out on Georges Arnaud’s novel Le Salaire de la Peur after the author announced he wanted the rights to go to a French director. Clouzot’s adaptation, Wages of Fear went on to win the awards for Best Film and Best Actor (for Charles Vanel) at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Bafta Film Award in 1955. The film, set in a South American town where a group of down-on-their-luck men are offered big bucks to drive trucks carrying nitroglycerine through a rough jungle to put out an oil well fire, also stars Clouzot’s wife Vera in a role he created specifically for her.
Vera also stared in Clouzot’s next big hit, the surprising and disturbing Les Diaboliques, after Clouzot once again beat Hitchcock to the rights of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s novel Celle qui n'était plus (She Who Was No More). It’s thought Psycho was Hitchcock’s unofficial version of Les Diaboliques, and an attempt to outshine his intense rival.
The showcase also features Clouzot’s second and most controversial feature film Le Corbeau (1943), a film financed by German run studio Continental Films. Regarded at the time as being harshly anti-French, Clouzot’s tale of paranoia, blackmail and revenge in a small French town was banned in France after the war, and Clouzot suspended for life from filmmaking by the CLCF (Comité de Libération du Cinéma Français). Fortunately for us, they later reduced the sentence to two years.
Quai Des Orfevres (1947), and The Truth, Clouzot’s 1961 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film round off this remarkable series. If it’s been a while since you got white knuckled watching a Clouzot masterpiece, this Director’s Showcase is the perfect opportunity to reacquaint yourself with the maestro. For those keen to see what all the fuss is about, you won’t get a better introduction than this. Enjoy.
Directors’ Showcase – every Sunday night at 8.30pm.