"Жамандықтар" ("Zhamandyqtar")

1955 film by Henri Georges Clouzot

the 1955 film

Les Diaboliques (le djabɔlik, released as Diabolique in the United States and variously translated as The Devils or The Fiends) is a 1955 French psychological horror thriller film co written and directed by Henri Georges Clouzot, starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse and Charles Vanel. It is based on the 1952 novel She Who Was No More (Celle qui n'était plus) 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. It was the 10th highest grossing film of the year in France, with a total of 3,674,380 admissions. The film also received the 1954 Louis Delluc Prize. Clouzot, after finishing The Wages of Fear (1953), optioned the screenplay rights, preventing Alfred Hitchcock from making the film. The film helped inspire Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). Robert Bloch, the author of the novel Psycho, stated in an interview that his all time favorite horror film was Les Diaboliques.

A second rate boarding school in Saint Cloud, Hauts de Seine, in the Paris metropolitan area, is run by the tyrannical and cruel Michel Delassalle. The school is owned, though, by Delassalle's teacher wife, the frail Christina, an émigrée from Venezuela. Michel also has an extramarital relationship with Nicole Horner, another teacher at the school. Rather than antagonism, the two women have a somewhat close relationship, primarily based on their apparent mutual hatred of Michel. He is cruel to the students, beats Nicole, and mocks Christina about her heart condition. Unable to stand his mistreatment any longer, Nicole devises a plan to get rid of Michel forever. Though hesitant at first, Christina ultimately consents to help Nicole. Using a threatened divorce to lure Michel to Nicole's apartment building in Niort, a town several hundred kilometers away, Christina sedates him. The two women then drown him in a bathtub and, driving back to the school, dump his body in the neglected 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. Afterwards, the suit that Michel had been wearing when they drowned him is returned from the dry cleaners. When the proprietor of the dry cleaners also returns a key to a room in a nearby hotel that was with the clothes, Christina goes to the room. There, the cleaning man tells her that Michel had kept the room for awhile but was rarely if ever seen and stored nothing there. Nicole sees in the newspaper that the police have found the corpse in the Seine. However, when Christina goes to the morgue, she finds it is not actually Michel's body. There, she meets Alfred Fichet, a retired senior policeman now working as a private detective. He becomes involved in the case, much to Nicole's chagrin. Christina, Nicole and other teachers find a student who claims that Michel has ordered him to rake leaves as punishment for breaking a window. Accusing him of lying, Christina confiscates his slingshot. Under the stress, Christina's heart condition worsens, and her doctors fear she may die soon unless she maintains strict bed rest. When the school photograph is taken, the result seems to show Michel's spectral figure in the window behind the students. Unnerved, Nicole leaves the school; she asks Christina to accompany her, but she is too ill and afraid. Christina, overcome by fear, confesses everything to Alfred. He does not believe her, but he investigates the pool. That night, Christina hears noises and wanders around the school. When she realizes that someone is following her, she runs back to her room. There, she finds Michel's corpse submerged in the bathtub, which is filled with water. Michel rises from the tub, and Christina suffers a fatal heart attack. Michel and Nicole have set up Christina from the beginning, with Michel acting as a vengeful ghost to scare Christina to death. However, Alfred hears their celebration and figures out everything, telling them they will be sentenced to 15 to 20 years in prison, depending on the judge. The school is closed in the wake of the scandal. As the children and teachers leave, the same boy who had earlier broken a window breaks another. When asked how he recovered his slingshot, the boy says that Christina gave it to him.

It was Clouzot's wife Vera who drew his attention to the Boileau Narcejac novel. Clouzot read it through the night and optioned the rights in the morning. He and his brother Jean (who took the pseudonym Jérôme Géronimi) Susan Hayward suggests that the gender switch made by Clouzot was caused not so much by censorship considerations (in the source novel, Lucienne and Mireille turn out to be a pair of lesbian lovers), but by his desire to create a sizeable role for his wife. The book has only one principal female character, Lucienne, since the supposed victim, Mireille disappears early on. Vera with her distinctly feminine demeanor was ill suited for the role of Lucienne (called Nicole in the film). So in Clouzot's script, Mireille (now named Christina) is the one who has a weak heart, and is the object of manipulation of her husband Michel and his mistress Nicole. Clouzot also followed the convention that the culprits should be exposed by the detective in the end (another departure from the novel where the authors let them get away).

Clouzot cast Simone Signoret in the role of Nicole. He previously filmed her husband Yves Montand in The Wages of Fear, and the two couples became friends. The director was also aware of Vera's limitations as an actress and needed someone to lend her support in such a demanding role. Signoret signed an eight week contract but the shooting actually took 16 weeks. She ended up being paid for only eight weeks of work despite staying until the end of the filming because she neglected to read the small print. Signoret's co star Paul Meurisse also recalls in his memoirs that the actress was further bemused by Clouzot's constant attempts to find clever ways of lighting Vera's face while muting the light on Signoret so she wouldn't upstage his wife. Clouzot knew Paul Meurisse back from 1939 when the latter was trying to pursue a singing career. Clouzot then was trying to sell his song lyrics to Edith Piaf, Meurisse's lover at the time. By the late 1940s Meurisse had become an established stage and screen actor, known for the roles of icy and sophisticated villains, and he seemed a natural choice for the role of Michel. The film featured two Clouzot regulars: Pierre Larquey as M. Drain and Noël Roquevert as M. Herboux. Michel Serrault made his screen debut as M. Raymond, one of the schoolteachers. Charles Vanel—who previously co starred in Clouzot's The Wages of Fear—was cast as the seemingly inept Inspector Fichet. Clouzot also auditioned 300 children and selected 35. Among them were Jean Philippe Smet (the future Johnny Hallyday), Patrick Dewaere's brother Yves Marie Maurin, and Georges Poujouly, who previously received acclaim in René Clément's Forbidden Games.

The filming began on August 18, 1954 and finished on November 30 the same year. The building and its surroundings matched the director's vision perfectly since they projected the desired mood of decay and neglect. The adjacent swimming pool was dirty and full of slime. Clouzot spent five weeks shooting at this location. The screenplay placed Nicole's house in Niort, but the actual house used for filming was in Montfort l'Amaury, just opposite the building that previously appeared in Clouzot's Le Corbeau. The morgue scenes were shot in the Institut Médico légal in Paris. The rest was filmed at Saint Maurice Studios southeast of Paris which took additional nine weeks. The cinematographer, Armand Thirard, used two camera crews to speed up the shooting that was falling behind schedule. Despite his efforts, the filming took twice longer than the projected 48 days. Originally the film was to be called Les Veuves (The Widows) but this was deemed unmarketable. Eleven weeks into filming it was changed to Les Démoniaques. Eventually it was renamed Les Diaboliques but this title was already used for a collection of short stories by the 19th century writer Barbey d'Aurevilly. Clouzot was permitted to use this title but only on the condition that he give the author a proper mention. He did it by opening the film with a quote from the preface to d'Aurevilly's work: "A portrait is always moral when it is tragic and shows the horror of the things it represents."

The film gained additional press when, only five years after its release, Véra Clouzot died of a heart attack, aged 46, somewhat mirroring her character in the film, who also had heart problems. Les Diaboliques is now considered a classic of the horror genre and film in general. Kim Newman wrote in Empire: "The horrific mystery has lost only a fraction of its power over the years, though literally dozens of films (see: Deathtrap, Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Games etc.) have borrowed part or all of its tricky storyline. This was one of the first movies to depend on a twist ending which forces you to reassess everything you thought you had been told earlier in the film." The British Film Institute included it in their list of the "100 Best Thrillers of All Time", calling it "a compelling, grisly thriller capped by an unforgettable twist ending." The Guardian listed is as No 19 among the 25 best horror films of all time. The scene in which Christina's husband emerges from the bathtub ranked number 49 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments. In 1964, TV writer/producer/director Joseph Stefano was inspired by this film to create a pilot for a thriller anthology series for the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Titled The Unknown, the pilot failed to take off. Stefano then rewrote and reshot it—adding fantasy elements in the process—as an episode of The Outer Limits called "The Forms of Things Unknown". Both versions starred Vera Miles as Kassia Paine, Barbara Rush as Leonora Raymond, and Scott Marlowe as their sadistic blackmailer returned from the dead, Andre Pavan. The 1967 film Games, written by Gene R. Kearney and directed by Curtis Harrington, and starring James Caan and Katharine Ross, has a different basic situation, but similar twists at the end, and again features Simone Signoret as the corrupt woman of mystery. British filmmaker Jimmy Sangster cited it as a major influence on his writing and directing, stating: "most of my 'psycho' type movies were derivative of each other and they all went back to my original inspiration: Les Diaboliques. I'm not the only one to follow that path. I guess I just did it more than most." An American version of Les Diaboliques, titled Reflections of Murder, was made by ABC in 1974, starring Tuesday Weld, Joan Hackett, and Sam Waterston. In 1993, another made for television film remake was made; this one was titled House of Secrets, and it starred Melissa Gilbert. In 1996, the film was remade again as Diabolique, adapted by Don Roos, directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik, and starring Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani in the leading female roles, with Chazz Palminteri as the husband and Kathy Bates as the detective.

The film was released on DVD by The Criterion Collection in July 1999 and was then re released on DVD and Blu ray in May 2011. The latter release features selected scene commentary by French film scholar Kelley Conway, a new video introduction by Serge Bromberg, and a new video interview with novelist and film critic Kim Newman.