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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 2/1/2025

Henri-Georges Clouzot

Alfred Hitchcock had one real competitor for the title of Master of Suspense: the French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot. Hitchcock himself invited the comparison, and Clouzot remarked publicly about how he was flattered by the comparison. This reputation comes from about half of Clouzot's films starting with his first, L'assassin habite au 21, through his best known films, a quartet that includes Le Corbeau, Quai des Orfevres, Les Diaboliques, and Wages of Fear.

However, Clouzot remains something of a mystery to me. Not because I dislike his films (I enjoyed his filmography, even the lesser-known films, quite a bit), but because he feels like he's more than just the French Hitchcock. The films that no one mentions (not that the English language conversation around Clouzot is robust or outside of a fairly small circle of film geeks), Manon, Miquette, The Spies, and especially his final two, La Verite and Woman in Chains, are real departures from the Hitchcock-aligned aesthetic. A couple of these could be fit in awkwardly (The Spies is too black and dry and cynical of a comedy to fit with Hitchcock's and Woman in Chains isn't lurid enough to fit in with something like Frenzy), but ultimately, the shortness of Clouzot's filmography highlights a comedy like Miquette more than a comedy like Mr. and Mrs. Smith does in Hitchcock's.

And, then there's the central question of Inferno, Clouzot's unfinished film that he filmed for about a month before his star walked off set and Clouzot had a heart attack, ending the production. Inferno could have been his magnum opus, and that it remains uncompleted reveals a large whole in the filmography that feels like it would contain real answers.

So, who was this guy?

Vichy

Clouzot began his filmmaking career as a writer. After a stint of a few years in a sanitarium for his health, he began writing films in the years that France's civil government was controlled by Vichy. Based on the success of some of these early films, he got a contract with Continental Films, a private film company run by Nazis (Goebbels had a hand in its formation). It was here that Clouzot started directing with L'assassin habite au 21 as part of Continental's efforts to replicate American films without actually importing American films, so L'assassin is a mystery/thriller/comedy that has certain basic bones that obviously come from Hitchcock.

The center of his career under Vichy, though, was Le Corbeau. Controversy surrounded the film the moment it was released, and it led to de Gaulle, post Vichy, banning Clouzot from filmmaking (the ban lasted about 2 years in the end). The nature of the controversy seems...ill-defined 80 years later. I remember reading that it was viewed as a critique of Vichy (very easy to read that in the film). I've read recently that it was viewed as a critique of provincial France (like cosmopolitan Parisians would care). I've also read that de Gaulle's explicit reasons were that the film was viewed as a critique of France in general. No matter the reason, though, Clouzot was viewed as political and controversial, the irony being that I cannot find any explicit mention from him about politics, ever. Once he got back into filmmaking, he made Quai des Orfevre, the closest he ever got to making a "pure" Hitchcock movie (and one of my favorites from Clouzot, it's really fun).

Hitchcock

Back on the wagon of the industry, Clouzot then proceeded to branch out. First was Manon an adaptation of Antoine Prevost's novel Manon Lescaut which is more melodrama than anything else and Miquette, a comedy. Clouzot later would say that Miquette itself was unsuccessful artistically (I thought it was light fun), and the films were not as successful at the box office as something like Quai, so he was forced to go back into the realm he'd made his name in: the mystery thriller with Les Diaboliques.

It's Les Diaboliques where the comparisons to Hitchcock become the most potent because Clouzot beat Hitchcock for the rights to the source novel, She Who Was No More by Boileau-Narcejac by mere hours. Hitchcock would later get the rights to the pair's novel The Living and the Dead to make into Vertigo. The film was a large success for Clouzot, and he followed it up with his masterpiece, Wages of Fear, also a concentrated dose of tension and suspense that could fit decently in with Hitchcock's body of work.

However, that's where the comparisons largely stop. There's a certain blackly comic aspect to The Spies that aligns somewhat with Hitchcock (think of moving the body in The Trouble with Harry), but the look at espionage is so much more cynical than Hitchcock ever showed in something like Foreign Correspondent or North by Northwest. And La Verite is a courtroom drama and character study about a woman's sexual past, a film that, on the surface, resembles a combination of some Hitchcock films (namely The Paradine Case and Marnie), but the differences between French and American film censorship allowed Clouzot to be much more frank about something like a woman's sex life. La Verite is also colder and more clinical than Marnie.

Inferno


And this is where one has to start talking about Inferno, Clouzot's unfinished film. He finished La Verite in 1960, Clouzot's first wife Vera (who acted in Wages of Fear, Les Diaboliques, and The Spies) died of a heart attack, and Clouzot entered a deep depression. He married again (Ines was her name) and started work a couple of years later on an experimental film about obsession, infidelity, and the blurring line between reality and unreality.

This was also the period when the French New Wave completely overturned the French film industry. Begun by the writers at Cahiers-du-Cinema, most namely Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard. The French industry before them was moribund, and they included Clouzot. Clouzot would admit that he bought into some of their criticisms (particularly around Les Diaboliques for some reason), but he and the new bad boys of French cinema never really saw eye to eye. The catch word that Cahiers du Cinema used was "improvisation". To that, Clouzot replied, "I improvise on the page," talking about how his pre-planning for production did not prevent emotional truth which people like Truffaut found through improvisation on set. That pre-planning always worked well for Clouzot in the past, but something happened over the course of pre-production and production of Inferno that turned everything on its head.

Serge Bromberg made a documentary about the film which included shot footage, interviews from surviving cast and crew, and some recreations. It's a deep dive into what went wrong, starting with an out of control pre-production process jet-fueled by "unlimited" funding Columbia executives which allowed Clouzot's crew to simply experiment nearly endlessly with different ways to capture and distort images. This should have been the planning stage where everything got sorted, but he went into production with things not quite ironed out. Production got really derailed with Clouzot's insistence on reshooting scenes over and over again, sometimes days or even weeks after having originally gotten things into the can, behavior that his crew called unusual for him (the main comparison comes with Quai). This behavior is what led to the male star of the film, Serge Reggiani, to walk off the set.

Why focus on this unfinished film? Because I think it was to be his magnum opus, the film that he threw himself into to try and define him in general. Because it nearly killed him. Because his final completed film, Woman in Chains recycles ideas, especially experimental cinematic ideas from it. This is a story of obsession, unreality through perception, and an effort to experiment would have defined him. Where would this have fallen in Clouzot's filmography? Would it have been a thriller/mystery like Quai or Les Diaboliques or would it have been a more experimental version of La Verite? I lean to the latter, that it was Clouzot trying to tell character stories with experimental techniques.

A Short Filmography


Clouzot only has 10 completed feature films (there could be eleven if you count his documentary The Mystery of Picasso and he has a section in the anthology film Return to Life), and as I started with, it makes each individual entry more important proportionally in trying to figure out who he was as an artist. He's known as the French Hitchcock for half of his films, but then there's the other half. The comedy, the blackly comic satire, the melodramatic literary adaptation, the courtroom drama, and the character study of sadism all stick out as distinctly different from the Hitchcock comparison.

Why focus on that comparison, though? Well, most people look to these posts as some source of recommendation while I just end up babbling on about a series of films few will ever dig into. And yet, I don't really do recommendations. "Will I like this movie?" I don't know most of you very well, and I definitely don't know your tastes. Just because I liked something doesn't mean that you will. So, I end up trying to take myself out of the equation (I can't sometimes, like with Schumacher, but I do try), and end up more descriptive.

So, when I spend this whole essay trying to find this distinction between Hitchcock and Clouzot, highlighting similarities and differences, I'm trying to create this roadmap for your own brains to take. "I like Hitchcock, but the differences sound like something I wouldn't like," or "I hate Hitchcock, but the differences sound like something I would like." Or anywhere in between.

It's also about highlighting little pockets of film history, finding bits and pieces throughout the last century plus of cinema from across the world to talk about, enjoy, and share. I really enjoyed this pocket, and I hope I've convinced at least some people to try out his work. He was good at it.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Companion

Dog Man

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It might have been a complete mess, but it might have also been an interesting complete mess. Claude Chabrol did make a film from Clouzot's script in the 90s, which I'll have to check out at some point, which combined with this documentary is the closest we'll ever get to seeing the final product Clouzot had in mind." [Library]

Five Guns West (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "But, as a first film from Corman, this showed surprising promise. It held together decently well. It looks shockingly good with Corman getting good and complex compositions with the help of his cinematographer Floyd Crosby from beginning to end." [YouTube]

Apache Woman (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, it's standard Western stuff. The kind of thing you'd expect to see in a double bill to fill the time. It's not good, but it's not terrible." [YouTube]

It Conquered the World (Rating 1/4) Full Review "It's silly nonsense. But it's also short, has some decent actors giving committed performances as they speak silly things, and it's professionally made. I mean…it's silly and dumb, but it's competently silly and dumb." [YouTube]

Not of This Earth (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "Instead, it's competent, partially effective, still kind of silly, a bit fun, but empty. It honestly might be his best film yet." [YouTube]

Attack of the Crab Monsters (Rating 2/4) Full Review "I mean, this is not a good film. The middle section is just kind of miserable nonsense. However, the first and final thirds of the film are actually decent and kind of fun in very different ways." [YouTube]

The Undead (Rating 2/4) Full Review "Anyway, it doesn't work. It's thin but it looks good. It's far from Corman's worst and it's showing an increased ambition from him and his writers (Griffith and Mark Hanna) which seems to indicate continued artistic growth. That's nice to see." [YouTube]

Teenage Doll (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "This movie is fine. It's not quite good, but it represents, I think, Corman and Griffith hitting some kind of groove. They're not quite hitting goodness, but they do seem to be hitting some consistent level of basic competence across an assortment of genres." [YouTube]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 2/22, and it will be about the Matthew Vaughn movie Argylle.