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BeTTer The devil YoU KNow
Murder is a family affair in two cracking movies from the Lewes Film Club
In 1954, according to Hollywood folklore, Alfred
Hitchcock missed out by hours on acquiring
the rights to a novel, The Woman Who Was, by
Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Instead a
French film director – Henri-Georges Clouzot,
fl<strong>us</strong>h with the success of The Wages of Fear –
snapped it up, and created a horror movie that
threatened to <strong>us</strong>urp the great master’s crown as
King of S<strong>us</strong>pense.
Les Diaboliques, it was called, starring Simone
Signoret, Clouzot’s
wife Véra Clouzot
and Paul Meurisse,
and it employed
many of the
cinematographic
tricks favoured by
Hitchcock himself,
to play with the audience’s sense of wellbeing. ‘Be
Sure to Take a Handkerchief’, read the blurb in
the American release trailer, ‘you’ll need it to dry
your palms.’
The story takes place in a boarding school, where
the tyrannical headmaster openly flaunts his
affair with a teacher in front of his wife. The two
women find themselves united by their mutual
disg<strong>us</strong>t of the man, and murder him, dumping his
body in the (weeded-up) swimming pool. When
the pool is drained, however, there’s no body
there, when the plot, in Hitchcockian fashion,
starts thickening.
There are bits in the film when the sheer nastiness
of the headmaster gives you the creeps, and then
there are the really psychologically disturbing
scenes, particularly one long shot in the dark,
featuring a corpse in the bath. I don’t want to
give anything away here: let’s j<strong>us</strong>t say that Fatal
Attraction doesn’t contain the scariest tub scene in
film history. The lighting in this particular scene:
w w w. V I VA l E w E s . C o M
chiaroscuro, heavy on the scuro, is particularly
effective.
Hitchcock made sure to buy the novelists’ next
book – he turned it into Vertigo – and it is said
that he was influenced to make Psycho as a
response to his rival’s movie. The big question is:
is it still as scary <strong>now</strong> as it was then? The answer,
inevitably, is no. Don’t worry too much about the
palms of your hands. But don’t let that put you
off a great movie experience. It’s a fine start to the
Lewes Film Club’s new season (Fri 17th, 8pm, £5)
The Film’s great strength is their mix of old
classics, and modern artho<strong>us</strong>e and foreign films
you might have missed, and the second film in
the season (Tues, 8pm, £6) is Mother, a 2009 film
by Korean director Bong Joon-ho. The original
title ‘Madeo’ plays on the fact that both English
words ‘mother’
and ‘murder’
are phonetically
identical when
transcribed into
Korean. The film
is a psychological
drama, centring on
a mother’s attempts to clear her son’s name after
he’s arrested for a murder she doesn’t believe he
committed. There’s a very Asian melodramatic
mystic realism about certain passages of the film:
the dance sequences that top and tail the action
linger long in the memory.
Both movies will be shown at the All Saints. For
a full list of the movies in the Film Club’s new
season, including a special weekend dedicated
to the Octoberfeast, and another (in January)
sponsored by Viva Lewes, see page 32. The FC
have genero<strong>us</strong>ly offered to give away four season
tickets to readers of Viva Lewes; see page 12 for
more details. Dexter Lee
F I l M
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