Monster Scum Lives – Day 11: Diabolique (1955)

It was about fifteen years ago that I saw the most recent film based on the novel Celle qui n’était plus by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. I remembered the basic gist of the tale but not much else. Now, having seen the 1955 French thriller Diabolique (or Les Diaboliques), even without remembering much I can safely say the 1996 Americanized remake was far less effective than this version. There is a reason this is a highly regarded film in general.

Christina Delassalle (Véra Clouzot) is in a tough situation. She runs a young boy’s boarding school with her husband Michel (Paul Meurisse) whose stern and controlling demeanor makes him hated by all including his wife. Michel harbors much resentment for Christina and she for him with his abusive and cheating mannerisms. After eight years together, Christina reaches the point where she wants Michel gone one way or another. She schemes with her closest companion Nicole (Simone Signoret), also Michel’s former mistress, and develop a fool-proof plan to dispatch of the man.

The two women lure Michel to Nicole’s house where he is sedated with a tainted bottle of wine and then submerged in a filled bathtub as Nicole keeps him under until his struggling stops. They load the body into a giant wicker trunk and cart it back to the boarding school where they dump it in the filthy swimming pool, thinking he will surface in a few days as an apparent accident or suicide. The body then disappears but other things appear in its place like his dry-cleaned suit or his lighter.

It is only within the past few years that I’ve come to appreciate foreign as well as black-and-white films. As such Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s thriller never really stuck out as a horror staple, probably due to the fact that it is made more than fifty years ago as well as subtitled. That is a shame though since Diabolique is a treat to watch for a prime example of how a tense film is put together. When the body goes missing and other haunting reminders of the missing man surface instead, you can feel the subdued panic between both women as they worry about the likelihood of going to jail, being blackmailed, or worse being hunted down by the man they were sure was dead. While the “horror” elements are rather tame, the tension between the two female leads and even the haunting “presence” by Michel is more than enough to create a great noir film with its suspenseful elements of paranoia and effective camerawork.