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"There's nothing romantic in love." Lyon, gray as ash, the ideal purgatory for the doleful orphan (Simone Signoret) saddled with wispy husband (Jacques Duby) and tyrannical mother-in-law (Sylvie). No passion for board games but plenty for the beefy trucker (Raf Vallone) who hails from Italy with traces of Ossessione, their illicit first kiss is witnessed by a slit-eyed black cat. "I only know how to do sad things," she confesses at the deserted ballroom, this new ardor is "a seizure." The break is far from clean, the husband is pushed out of the night express and the locomotive bears down on the camera in a fateful frontal image. Guilt and suspicion fray the clandestine couple: "He's heavier dead than alive." Filming Zola, Marcel Carné registers the shadow of film noir since Le Jour se Lève. (Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice are visible, so is Day of Wrath.) Unsettled by doubt, the lovers are half-silhouetted against an iron gate with the distant cityscape dotted with lights. "If love has wings, so do the police." The matriarch is stricken upon news of her boy's demise, and funnels all her paralyzed fury into a glare as fearsome as Medusa's. Hitchcock's Blackmail is meanwhile adduced in the former soldat (Roland Lesaffre) who hopes to end a lifetime of lousy luck with a sideline of extortion. (The mangled body on the tracks gives way to the squalid Paris flat, the would-be witness hatches the idea while shaving and wipes the cream off the blade on the newspaper headline.) A relief from the ponderous fatalism of the protagonists, the rotter gladly flaunts his amorality until he's flattened by a barreling load of irony. "I've seen ships sunk, towns burned, pals killed, so what's one corpse more or less to me?" Clouzot carries Signoret along for the cold burlesque of Diabolique. Cinematography by Roger Hubert. With Marcel André, Paul Frankeur, and Maria Pia Casilio. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |