LES DIABOLIQUES and the Curse of Previous Greatness

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Henri-Georges Clouzot's LES DIABOLIQUES has never worked for me.

You can understand my confusion. This film has been revered as highly as anything from Hitchcock. Its director has all the indications of cinematic genius. Two of his previous films, LE CORBEAU and LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR, I would call unsettling, compelling, and extremely effective in the art of torturing nerves. Indeed, many people have been tortured by LES DIABOLIQUES. Why, then, does it bore me?

Without spoiling any details of the plot for the five or six people on this planet who have not seen the film, I would guess that it fails for me in being too long and too tidy.

The trouble, here, is escalation beyond the actual murder. Up until this point, the film sets up its characters, their problem, and their scheme to solve that problem, with a certain efficiency. Beyond this point, complications arise -- too many, I think, and with diminishing returns. We have the pool, and then the suit, and then the hotel room, but then we also have the newspaper article, and then the intrusive old man, and then the punished schoolboy, and then the school photograph, and then the typewriter: these are too much, they take up too much time, and they reduce the tension through sheer weight of delay.

A similar escalation was used in LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR, but with a difference: the protagonists of that film faced a risk of death at every second, and the more complications that arose, the more likely these people were to die at any moment. This gave the film a tension that made my clenched hands ache, a mood of dread that few films can match. In contrast, escalation makes LES DIABOLIQUES drag onwards into tedium. It should have been turning thumbscrews, but instead, it kept me glancing at the clock: "Are we there yet?"

This bulging pile of escalation comes with a starkness of plot that seems too contrived, too neat, with every i dotted, with every t crossed. In its messiness and panic, LE CORBEAU seems like a nightmare; with its rising tension, LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR seems like a truck out of control on a mountainside. These films are dangerous; they disturb me; they trouble me long after their endings. When LES DIABOLIQUES finally ends, whatever effect it might have had vanishes in the daylight. (Yes, we have that coda, but instead of disturbing me, it makes me embarrased for the script writers.)

My opinion, of course, is nothing more than one opinion. The film has long been famous, and is often cited as the masterpiece of a great director. In my view, however, the merits of his previous films leave this one pale and weak.