Claude Chabrol’s first “comeback” film, Les Biches, opened on March 22, 1968. One of our favorite directors here at Mid Century Cinema (dedicated subscribers will recall that we’ve written about him repeatedly, with our top ten list, some words about The Line of Demarcation (a notable obscurity), an essay about that astonishing run of films in the final decade of his life, and, of course, with our indispensable, complied-to-be-contested user’s guide to (almost) all of his fifty-plus feature films). Over the course of a career that spanned six decades, Chabrol had many more ups than downs, but there were indeed some fallow patches (and thus all those unexpected, fertile, spectacular comebacks), including a cluster of films that included The Twist, which he would later describe as “the second worst film ever made” (our notes just say: “definitely the worst Chabrol”). And the period before Le Biches did represent several years in the wilderness for the filmmaker, who, after heralding the arrival of the French New Wave with Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, and continuing with a flurry of movies that included the early masterpiece Les Bonnes Femmes, was by 1964 nevertheless reduced to the status of director-for-hire, churning out the reliable entertainments of others.
Essentially written off, in 1968 Chabrol would resurface with the critically acclaimed Le Biches, the first in a series of twelve remarkable films that I have dubbed his “second wave”—which I discuss at length here, in this new essay for Bright Lights Film Journal. Among the films discussed are La Femme Infidele, “the film that set the template for second-wave Chabrol” which “displays Chabrol’s interest not simply in guilt, but in the more dramatically complex concept of shared guilt”; Just Before Nightfall, “one of the great films of the 1970s . . . Chabrol’s most representative film, and arguably his masterpiece”; and Innocents with Dirty Hands, which features one of Romy Schneider’s greatest performances—“a great film on its own merits [it also provides] something of a summary statement of the entire period.”
But this was just a programming note . . . we recommend checking out the new essay.
Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran in Just before Nightfall