Word: clouzot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PERENNIAL success of Hitchcock at the box office shows fear to be a popular commodity. In the American film world, shock and suspense are synonymous with Hitchcock. In France, the leading master of fear is Henri-Georges Clouzot...
Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear, Diabolique) is a French film maker whose stock in trade is grafting psychological aberrations onto standard and somewhat sleazy melodrama. In La Prisonnière, his first film in eight years, Clouzot once again mixes an ordinary story with kinky characters, a soupçon of violence, and a touch of Krafft-Ebing just to add some spice. The result is pat, predictable and more than a little distasteful...
Games seems to have been put together by a new producer-director team with old ideas. "O.K.," they might have said, "for a Name we have Simone Signoret-46 years old, French accent-let's make her the heavy in a thriller-chiller. She used to work with Clouzot, didn't she? Remember his Diabolique, about a guy spooking his wife with a faked murder? Great! Remember that other wife-spooker, Gaslight-all in a terrific Victorian house? Great! Only let's make it a terrific modern house-mod, pop, camp, the sophisticated rich, and the decadent...
Working four-week stretches in Hollywood, then zipping off to New York and Europe, he "converges" clients wherever he goes. Next week he leaves for a Swiss skiing colloquium with Irwin Shaw, Peter Viertel, Anatole Litvak, Darryl Zanuck and Henri-Georges Clouzot. He never considers himself on vacation. Once, meeting 20th Century-Fox's Buddy Adler by chance in Paris, Lazar sold him Cole Porter's Can-Can for $750,000. On another occasion, he was saving money by flying tourist class when, looking beyond the partition, he saw Spyros Skouras sitting up forward in Firstville. "I could...
Much of the film is shocking to a viewer unused to the apparent helplessness of the defendant in a French trial. Yet Director Clouzot's somewhat muddled J'Accuse is directed at more than the Napoleonic Code. It is intended to be a reproach to a callous society. But society will seize any excuse, even tepid acting, to avoid recognizing a reproach. And while Brigitte is an adequate comedienne, her dramatic acting is in the old cowboy tradition of two emotions-hat on and hat off. Except, of course, that with BB what comes...