Word: chabrols
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...temptation to forgive Chabrol for this excess is formidable; the story deals with a depraved woman, and the humiliation meted out to her seems apt. But in so doing, the director irreparably damages the flow of the narrative, and the next transition only calls attention to his oversight. Realizing that he has abandoned the intrepid detectives in the mid-stream of their investigation, Chabrol suddenly thrusts them back into the picture as a not-so-subtle afterthought. The policemen somehow fasten onto the idea that the husband--long ago presumed to have been the victim of a murder they cannot...
...then Chabrol destroys what little credibility Dirty Hands has left. Having led the viewer to believe that Schneider's paramour--and not her husband--had been murdered through a cunning substitution of bodies made by Steiger, the story now repeats the Lazarus twist and brings the wife-stealer back to life, even giving him some of the very same lines uttered by Steiger after his re-emergence. In place of the promised "erotic thriller," you see only farce tinged with a certain arrogance as to what an audience will swallow...
...problems plaguing this chaos-as-cinema. Few foreign films are dubbed these days, and with good reason; the awkward insertion of another person's voice speaking a different tongue into the lips of the original actors, besides being aesthetically offensive, robs the viewer of the genuine performance. But Chabrol unaccountably elected to ignore this long-accepted truism, perhaps as part of a misguided effort to accommodate the English-speaking Steiger. Combine this blunder with the normally sluggish quality of a Chabrol screenplay, and you come up with a film virtually stripped of a crucial dimension--the dialogue...
...certain point in the narrative of what has transpired thus far. Such devices are designed to perform a service for the audience, and the elaborately tangled plots of some films belonging to this genre cry out for an occasional rehash, so long as the timing is judicious. But Chabrol seems unable to grasp the delicacy that this device requires. The authorities' periodic attempts to sort out the more baffling knots in the narrative come off as hopelessly contrived, and Chabrol's vain effort to draw a confused viewer back into the uneven flow of the story merely succeeds in driving...
...Dirty Hands should end without a few harsh words about the movie's politics, what little there are to be found. An insidious sexism threads its way through the framework of the story, occasionally exposing itself in all its nakedness before submerging beneath the fabric of its jerky plot. Chabrol saves the bulk of his wrath for Schneider, a modern Circe whose corruption and faithlessness bring down both of the men in her life. She is held responsible for the havoc wreaked in this film; her partner in adultery is little more than a good-looking schmuck only too willing...