Les Diaboliques Movie Review

Devilishly suspenseful, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s thriller about two women who conspire to knock off a sadistic boarding-school headmaster (Paul Meurisse)  – one of the women is his wife, the other his mistress – has all the dark humour and clever tension of a Hitchcock. Simone Signoret (pictured) as the peroxide-blonde mistress is the harder of the two would-be killers, while Véra Clouzot is shivering and simpering as the wife. It’s a great yarn, with a delicious twist (don’t be ‘diabolique’ and ruin the end for your friends, warn the end credits), as Signoret and Clouzot dispose of their victim but then must deal with creepy signs that their plan might be coming unstuck. Charles Vanel steals the show late on as a shambling, pre-Columbo detective, but the real star is Clouzot as director who maintains a sense of dread and mystery until the end by taking his shaggy-dog story deadly seriously.Les Diaboliques  Movie Review

Les Diaboliques Movie Trailer

Christina, overcome by fear, tells Alfred everything. He does not believe her and does nothing against her, but he investigates the pool. Christina hears some noises and wanders the school. After following sounds around the school and discovering a note on Michel's unused typewriter, she concludes that someone is in the school and she runs back to her room. She finds Michel's corpse in the bathtub. Michel rises from the tub, and Christina has a heart attack and dies.
Michel and Nicole have set up Christina from the beginning. Michel is not dead, but acting dead to scare Christina to death, knowing she is suffering from a serious heart condition. But as soon as Nicole and Michel escape Alfred is there to arrest them.
As the movie ends, the same boy who had earlier broken a window breaks another. When asked how he got his slingshot back, the boy says that Christina gave it back to him. Having seen Christina's death, some shaky argument can be said about the mental state of the boy, or the finality of Christina's death. A final title screen tells the audience not to reveal the ending to others.

Les Diaboliques Movie Wiki

The story takes place in a second-rate boarding school run by the tyrannical and mean Michel Delassalle (Meurisse). The school, though, is owned by Delassalle's teacher wife, the frail Christina (Clouzot), and Delassalle flaunts his relationship with Nicole Horner (Signoret), a teacher at the school. Rather than antagonism, the two women are shown to have a somewhat close relationship, primarily based on their apparent common hatred of Michel, who is physically and emotionally abusive to both.
Unable to stand his mistreatment any longer, Nicole devises a plan. Though hesitant at first, Christina ultimately consents to help Nicole. Using a threatened divorce to lure Michel to Nicole's apartment building in a remote village several hundred kilometers away, Christina sedates him. The two women then drown him in a bathtub and dump his body in the school's neglected swimming pool. When his corpse floats to the surface, they think it will appear to have been an accident. Almost everything goes according to their plans until the body fails to surface, and Michel's corpse is nowhere to be found when the pool is drained.
Nicole sees in the paper that the police found a corpse. Christina goes to the morgue and learns it is not Michel's body. There she meets Alfred Fichet (Vanel), a retired private detective. He gets involved in the case, much to Nicole's chagrin.

Les Diaboliques Movie Poster

Les Diaboliques (French pronunciation: ​[lɛ diaboˈlikə]), released as Diabolique in the United States and variously translated as The Devils or The Fiends, is a 1955 French black-and-white psychological thriller feature film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot and Paul Meurisse. It is based on the novel Celle qui n'était plus (She Who Was No More) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. The story blends elements of thriller and horror, with the plot focusing on a woman and her husband's mistress who conspire to murder the man; after the crime is committed, however, his body disappears, and a number of strange occurrences ensue. The film was the 10th highest grossing film of the year with a total of 3,674,380 admissions in France.[3]
Clouzot, right after finishing Wages of Fear, snatched the screenplay rights from master of suspense director, Alfred Hitchcock.[citation needed] This movie helped inspire Hitchcock's Psycho.[citation needed] Robert Bloch himself, the author of the novel Psycho, has stated in an interview that his all-time favorite horror film is Diabolique