Henri-Georges Clouzot

Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977), French director of dark suspense thrillers. Clouzot has often been compared to Alfred Hitchcock, and there was something of a rivalry between the two directors in the 1950s, although Clouzot’s output was less prolific. He was born on November 20, 1907, in Niort, western France, the son of a bookseller. Clouzot suffered poor health throughout his life, and in his 20s spent several years in a tuberculosis sanatorium, where he claimed to have studied the human condition.

He worked for a dubbing studio in Berlin in the 1930s, and also established himself as a writer of such films as Un Soir de Rafle (1931; Dragnet Night), Le Duel (1939), Le Dernier des Six (1941; The Last One of the Six), and Les Inconnus dans la Maison (1942; Strangers in the House). Under the German occupation of France during World War II, Clouzot was made head of the script department at the Nazi-sponsored studio, Continental, for which he also directed the thriller L'Assassin Habite... au 21 (1942; The Murderer Lives at Number 21). After the war, Clouzot found himself under investigation as a Nazi sympathizer for his bleak thriller Le Corbeau (1943; The Raven), in which a mysterious figure intimidates a French provincial community by means of anonymous letters. The film was banned and the director barred from working for two years, although Clouzot was later absolved and Le Corbeau lauded for its anti-Nazi subversiveness.

Clouzot resumed his career in 1947 with Quai des Orfèvres (Quay of the Goldsmiths), a murder thriller set in the entertainment business, which was a popular success and won him the Best Director award at Venice. In the 1950s he beat Hitchcock to the rights of Georges Arnaud’s novel Le Salaire de la Peur, and the resulting film, starring Yves Montand, The Wages of Fear (1953), which portrayed the hazardous transport of a cargo of nitroglycerine through the South American jungle with excruciating suspense, became Clouzot’s first international success. He trumped Hitchcock a second time when he bought the rights to the Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac novel that became Les Diaboliques (1955; The Devils), a relentless thriller in which the wife (played by the director’s wife Vera) and mistress (Simone Signoret) of a cruel headmaster conspire to murder him, and then to misplace the corpse, with petrifying consequences.

Among Clouzot’s later films were Les Espions (1957; The Spies), La Vérité (1960; The Truth), La Prisonnière (1968; Female Prisoner), and a unique documentary portrait of Pablo Picasso at work, Le Mystère Picasso (1956). L'Enfer (Hell), a project abandoned in 1964 due to ill health, was later filmed by Claude Chabrol in 1994.