Les Diaboliques (1954)

Classy film time. And it's French, which makes it doubly classy. Les Diaboliques is the signature film of Henri-Georges Clouzot, the French Hitchcock. It's the story of the wife and mistress of a real bastard (I believe his name was Jean-Luc Bastardo) who plot to kill him and thereby do the world a favour. It's no hyperbole- this is man who runs a private school and serves the kids rotten food and leaves everyone else wanting while he wants for nothing as well as subjecting these 2 women to mental and physical abuse. The one he's married to- he's using her for her money and the 'other' woman will always be just that.
I knew nothing about Clouzot before this film but this film is completely Hitchcock-ian, to the point that i knew he would be dubbed the 'French Hitchcock'. The guy is playing every note of the Hitchcock songbook- duplicitous leading characters, characters with percieved mental illness, comic background characters, red herrings and more.
So it's for this reason, that Les Diaboliques can't resonate with me the way it would have done had I seen it 50years ago. Unfortunately, it's another casualty of 'me seeing the things that were inspired by it' in the meantime and so the ending was telegraphed to me from about 5mins in.
Which is not to say that the rest of the 2hrs was insufferable but it wasn't as if you could appreciate in a Columbo-way either.
What is good is that, the film spends less time concentrated on the run-up to the murder; that's over after the first 40mins but more on the aftermath of the act and trying to continue without arousing suspicion and I really appreciated that when the obligatory police/investigator starts asking questions it's so light and uninvasive, that he might as well have not bothered at all; i love that sort of subversion on the genre.
But though it's well acted and quite funny in parts, in that Hitchcock-style of dark humour- I must insist that these sorts of things do depend heavily, almost unfairly so on the ending and since i'd seen this ending, in admittedly lesser endeavours like ITV dramas and episodes of... well basically anything featuring a police person or a mystery, it severely reduced the impact of this French crime classic for me but it's not to blame either. It's a Force majeure of sorts...

I watched Les Diaboliques (1954) on BluRay, via LoveFilm.
My 2011 in Movies will return with Hanna (2011) ...