David Vining's Blog, page 26

Henri-Georges Clouzot: The Definitive Ranking

Another one in the books!

The short ones come and go so fast that it feels like I’ve barely started before I’ve finished, and that’s exactly how I feel about Clouzot’s work. It’s put a bug in me to discover more of his work, namely the movies he wrote but did not direct before he started directing himself. However, beyond that, there’s really not that much. There’s Inferno, which I did watch but is incomplete and more of a documentary about Clouzot than anything else, but the death of Clo...

Henri-George Clouzot’s Inferno

A view of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s filmography cannot be complete with at least acknowledging his lost, partially shot film, Inferno. Production began in the summer of 1964 and fell apart in about a month. Incomplete and unable to find funds to continue, Clouzot abandoned the film, eventually adopting some of his ideas into Woman in Chains, his final feature film. The story of the disruption of the film remained something of a mystery to the more casual of film goers until 2009 with the relea...

Woman in Chains

It took 8 years for Clouzot to put together his final film, Woman in Chains, after the falling apart of L’Enfer in 1964, and in the middle of the tumult that was the complete reorganization of the French film industry because of the rise of the French New Wave. Obviously working in similar spaces as Antonioni in Blow Up and Powell in Peeping Tom, Woman in Chains is a story of perversion that retains a certain distance similarly to how Clouzot ended with La Verite. I don’t think this is as co...

La Verite

Vera Clouzot died around the release of The Spies, and Henri-Georges Clouzot fell into a deep depression at the death of his beloved wife. His next film, released three years later, is the story of a young woman facing a public trial and inquiry into her sex life that led to the death of her ex-lover (which Vera has a cowriting credit on). I have no idea if the two are connected. However, it’s obvious that Clouzot saw his days as the French Master of Suspense as behind him. Perhaps he never ...

The Spies

There’s something about black comedies played very dryly that appeals to me. I’m often laughing at action and never quite sure if I’m supposed to be. That’s what I found myself doing pretty consistently while watching Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Spies, a tale of madness in Paris, a mixture of Hitchcockian wrong-man tropes and surrealism that combines better than Hitchcock’s own Spellbound.

Doctor Malic (Gerard Sety) is approached by American Colonel Howard (Paul Carpenter). There’s a myst...

The Mystery of Picasso

I usually don’t do documentaries in this feature film exploration of cinema, but I have to blame myself for this one. I simply didn’t realize it was a documentary. Had I known, I think I might have not put it on the schedule. Well, it’s on the schedule, so I watched it! Helped by the fact that it’s easily available on the Criterion Channel, and we’re off to the races!

There’s not a whole lot to talk about in The Mystery of Picasso, so this is gonna be a short one.

Clouzot, interested i...

The Way of the Strong

The one extant Capra film I could not find a copy of in my run, and the major reason I was excited about this 4K/Blu-ray box set of Capra’s work at Columbia (well, most of it). And it ends up being one of my favorite Capra silents. Like much of Capra’s work at the time, there’s a certain throwaway feel to the film, like Capra never expected the film to have a life beyond a few weeks, at most, in a movie theater. It’s a quick 60-minute adventure through a love triangle and mobsters that has a...

Juror #2

#10 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood’s filmography.

He did it! He blew it up! Damn him all to hell! (Eastwood made a movie when I thought he was done and did his ranking…which means that adding to that ranking is more work than I want to deal with…and his representatives are talking about getting funding for another film which, combined with Juror #2‘s great performance on Max, seems guaranteed). Oh well. At least the movie was good. Maybe even really good.

Justin (Nicholas Hoult) gets ...

Les Diaboliques

Henri-Georges Clouzot promotes his wife, Vera, from minor character to star, adapting a novel written by Boileau-Narcejac that Alfred Hitchcock really wanted first but couldn’t get in time (he would get Vertigo from the same writer later). This is actually the third time or so I’ve seen it, so the ending was known to me as I watched it through this time. Not that I’d give away the ending to a more than 70 year old movie (eh, I would, but I guess I’ve been conditioned into not doing it), but ...

The Wages of Fear

His previous film, Miquette, being a financial disappointment, Henri-Georges Clouzot finally returned to the world of suspense after a two film break. The Wages of Fear, based on a novel by Georges Arnaud, is Clouzot’s most hopeless and technically well-crafted film, a marvel of suspense and tension that stretches simple events to the breaking point. Four men facing nature down in search of a victory to get them out of the unnamed Central American nation where they’ve found themselves trappe...