The ever-dedicated staff here at Mid Century Cinema has been revisiting some of the films of Claude Chabrol for a forthcoming essay about his “second wave” of films—a remarkable dozen releases between 1968 and 1975. One of our favorite directors, and, although of course (following the Dylan rules), we didn’t know him, we nevertheless have an unabashed fondness for him. Dave Kehr, upon hearing of Chabrol’s death in 2010, offered this: “A very funny, very gracious man, with the perpetual look of a startled owl and an openness to everyone who approached him. A great director and a great critic, his loss leaves the world of the cinema appreciably smaller.” Really, unless you’re running into burning buildings to save children, that’s a heck of a way to be remembered. (Kehr also wrote this excellent obituary for the New York Times, worth perusing as well is this collection of tributes compiled by David Hudson.)
Chabrol is associated with thrillers, and partially for that reason is often not taken as seriously as his peers. (Another reason is that he also made a number of very bad films.) But this misses the point—Chabrol was often borrowing the superficial conventions of the suspense film as cover for making movies with something to say. As he explained to Roger Ebert, in a career-defining comment: “I knew I was interested in murder, but . . . my interest isn’t in solving puzzles. I want to study the human behavior of people involved in murder.” Too see this is to recognize that his movies are not about the crimes, but explorations (complex, compromised) characters, their relationships, and the social-cultural context of their moral struggles and ethical dilemmas.
There is, scandalously, no major biography of Chabrol in English. And we’re not going to provide one here, but a quick bit of background before we turn to our user’s guide: Born in 1930 in Paris, Chabrol was evacuated to the provinces during the occupation, where he fell in love with the movies in the quiet of the countryside, running a modest film club that screened movies in a barn. Returning to the capital, although his parents hoped he would pursue a career as a pharmacist, he quickly took to running with a different crowd—a group of young cinephiles, all of whom would eventually become world famous: Jean Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut. These five friends (among others) haunted the Cinémathèque Française, where they fell under the tutelage of its co-founder and director and Henri Langlois, as well as the influence of André Bazin, who would co-found and edit of the renowned film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, for which they would all write. One of Chabrol’s essays in Cahiers, in defense of “little themes,” offers a touchstone of the ethos of the French New Wave, on par with Truffaut’s famous and furious “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema.”
They would eventually drift apart, in the way that such things naturally happen, but in the beginning there was a real esprit de corps, as these Young Turks helped each other out, appeared in each other’s early, short films, and argued the day. Chabrol, with Rohmer, would write the first serious study of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and Chabrol was the first to release a feature—and his early success helped finance the early efforts of his friends. Probably, you had to be there.
The Feature Films of Claude Chabrol: A User’s Guide
(Note – we don’t do justice to these waves here, for more, see our essay on the second wave and our earlier discussion of the fourth wave; eventually we’ll take on one and three. Note also that as always we follow a version of the Halliwell system: stars are not ratings, but designations of merit. Which also means that there can be good things and often striking sequences in an un-starred film, but as a whole we did not find the movie worthy of special attention or urgent recommendation. ns = “not seen”)
The First Wave
Le Beau Serge (1958) *
Les Cousins (1959) **
A Double Tour (1959) *
Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) ***
Les Godelureaux (1961)
L’oeil du Malin (1962) *
Landru (1963)
Ophelia (1963)
Les Cousins
Into the Wilderness
Code Name: Tiger (1964)
Blue Panther (1965)
Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite (1965)
The Line of Demarcation (1966) *
The Champagne Murders (1967)
Who’s Got the Black Box (1967)
The Line of Demarcation
The Second Wave
Les Biches (1968)
The Unfaithful Wife (1969) **
This Beast Must Die (1969) **
Le Boucher (1970) *
La Rupture (1970) *
10 Days Wonder (1971)
Just Before Nightfall (1971) ***
Doctor Popaul (1972)
Les Noces Rouges (1973) *
Nada (1974)
The Pleasure Party (1975)
Innocents with Dirty Hands (1975) ***
Just Before Nightfall
Inconsistency and Drift
Death Rite (1976)
Folies Bourgeoises (1976)
Alice or the Last Escapade (1977)
Blood Relatives (1978) *
Violette (1978) *
The Proud Ones (1980) ns
The Hatter’s Ghost (1982) *
The Blood of Others (1984)
Violette
The Third Wave
Poulat Au Vinaigre (1985) **
Inspector Lavardin (1986)*
Masques (1987) **
Cry of the Owl (1987) *
Story of Women (1988) *
Jours Tranquilles a Clichy (1990)
Dr. M (1990)
Madame Bovary (1991) *
Betty (1992) */**
The Eye of Vichy (1993) *
L’Enfer (1994)*
La Ceremonie (1995)*
Betty
A Brief Intermission
The Swindle (1997)
The Fourth Wave
The Color of Lies (1999) ***
Merci Pour Le Chocolat (2000) */**
The Flower of Evil (2002) **
The Bridesmaid (2004) *
Comedy of Power (2006) **
A Girl Cut in Two (2007) */**
Inspector Bellamy (2009) *
The Color of Lies