|
The Psycho foretaste is at once seen, fetid waters behind the opening credits. A boarding school for boys, Vigo's setting drained of anarchic joy, tykes peeping furtively at the Gothic cruelties around them. The headmaster (Paul Meurisse) is a penny-pinching sadist with a "fragile" wife (Vera Clouzot), he forces her to gulp rancid fish before the students and then assaults her once the dining hall is cleared. His mistress (Simone Signoret) is a beefy blonde hiding a shiner behind her shades, the two women plot the tyrant's overthrow: "If you miss your chance, he won't miss his." The deed is done during a holiday weekend, drugged bottle and bathtub and wicker trunk, upstairs an elderly couple can't listen to their inane radio shows. The murky swimming pool receives the corpse, "darkness does the rest." The Henri-Georges Clouzot cosmos nonpareil, ugliness oozing from every pore of character and environment alike. Fear and guilt squash the delicate masochist, a candle in her pious shrine is used to light the cigar of the retired police commissioner (Charles Vanel). Dread is a metaphysical matter, it's in the obscene gurgling of a drain (cf. Lang's House by the River) and in the spectral figure in the class photograph, a pair of teachers (Michel Serrault, Pierre Larquey) keep a sardonic running commentary. "Stop playing with your nerves!" A vicious joke on feminine solidarity, a faint ticker not made for revenge. Clouzot's clammy virtuosity builds to a scabrous coup de théâtre with a rattling typewriter ahead of The Shining, unmistakably emulated in Young's Wait Until Dark. The tiny "mythomaniaque" at the close heralds the mystical return. "A painting is always quite moral when it is tragic and it gives the horror of the things it depicts," says d'Aurevilly. Cinematography by Armand Thirard. With Jean Brochard, Thérèse Dorny, Noël Roquevert, and Jean Lefebvre. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |