Amazon.com Essentials:
Legend has it that Henri-Georges Clouzot beat out Alfred Hitchcock to
secure
the rights to this novel, which proved to be a veritable blueprint for an
icy masterpiece of murder, mystery, and suspense. Véra Clouzot plays the
sickly wife of a callous headmaster of a provincial boarding school going
to seed, and the commanding Simone Signoret is the headmaster's mistreated
mistress. Together they plot and carry out his murder, a brutal drowning
that director Clouzot documents in chilly detail, but the corpse
disappears, and a nosy detective starts sniffing around the grounds as
threatening notes taunt the women. Clouzot's thriller is as precise and
accomplished a work as anything in Hitchcock's canon, a film of grueling
suspense and startling shocks in an overcast, gray world of decay, but his
icy manipulations lack the human dimension and emotional resonance of the
master of suspense. The film has been accused of being misanthropic by many
critics, and Clouzot's attitude toward his characters is bitter at best,
contemptuous at worst. The viewer is left on the outside looking in, but
the razor precision and terrifying twists deliver a sleek, bleak spectacle
worthy of attention. --Sean Axmaker
