Word: viewer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Having dragged the viewer through the police investigation and voice-over readings of the letters written to Schneider from her lover on the lam, Chabrol finally throws in some new twists. Steiger resurfaces out of nowhere, savoring the confrontation with his faithless wife as he relates how he foiled her best-laid plans to do him in. Watching the would-be widow get her just desserts restores a sense of justice to the film, but here the structure of the story shows its first signs of coming a cropper. Chabrol chooses to dwell on Steiger's triumph for several more...
...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 do not exhaust the list of 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...
...Things are not always as they appear to be", is the theme that flirts with the audience throughout this fast-paced and cynical musical vaudeville. The viewer is immediately conned into believing the show lacks a consistent plot and has few lessons to be learned. Since things are not always as they appear to be, it is not until the end that we realize the play had a message which we were part of all along and like the women portrayed in Chicago, the come-on is such a tease we are hardly satisfied by the finale...
Werner Herzog serves as a textbook example of this Teutonic "New Wave." His work demands a special kind of viewer, a sensibility that can accommodate the warped and the damned souls of this world. His 1972 film Aguirre: The Wrath of God suggested Herzog's affinity for dwelling on the sordid side of things; watching a demented Spanish conquistador in search of his El Dorado foam at the mouth for the better part of 90 minutes, one could sense a sublimated sadism at work in the movie...