Simone Signoret – Christian Sauvé

Les diaboliques (1955)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-11-292023-03-19 Movie Review

(Criterion Streaming, November 2019) Mid-1950s French cinema isn’t exactly high on my list of favourite viewing attractions, but Les diaboliques is one big exception. Even after decades of imitators, ever-stronger thrills and jaded audiences, that pure thriller still has the power to shock and surprise. Much of the plot revolves around two women plotting to murder a man and what happens afterwards. But the plot is best kept under wraps, because there’s That Scene where the impossible happens, you jump in your seat and think that the supernatural has invaded the film. It hasn’t, and the film eventually delivers a Hitchcock-grade explanation for everything. It’s quite a shocker, and writer-director Henri-Georges Clouzot, working from a suspense novel by Boileau-Narcejac, here delivers one of his best movies. Simone Signoret is also remarkable in one of the main roles—as is the crisp black-and-white cinematography. I won’t say more—good movies speak for themselves, and Les diaboliques explicitly told me not to spoil it.

Movie Review

Ship of Fools (1965)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-01-152020-09-06 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, January 2019) There are many ways in which Ship of Fools reminded me of Grand Hotel—its 1930s setting, its ensemble cast with overlapping subplots, its black-and-white cinematography and its mixture of American and German characters. However, the comparisons only go so far and the crucial difference between the two movies is not that one is in a building and the other on an ocean liner, but that one was made in 1932 and the other one after World War II. As a result, expect a lot more Nazis in Ship of Fools than Grand Hotel, and the portentous veil that this distance casts over the entire film. As the film begins assembling its large cast of characters, it quickly becomes apparent that this isn’t just about people travelling from North America to Europe on a steam ship, but a message movie about the rise of fascism in Europe. (Contemporary viewers would have known that from seeing that it’s directed by Stanley Kramer, a renowned social issues filmmaker.) The foreboding feeling is accentuated by the characters opposing their views on the world, and the film sides squarely with the marginalized over more conventional heroes. (In addition to characters with terminal illnesses or mental conditions, there are Jewish characters, obviously, and the film’s most likable character, its narrator, is played by 3′10″ Michael Dunn in an Oscar-nominated performance.) The ensemble cast is impressive, what with Lee Marvin, Vivien Leigh (in her last film), José Ferrer and a terrific Simone Signoret. Ship of Fools is certainly preachy, but there’s a powerful sense of impending doom as the characters get closer to their German port of arrival. The last few moments are particularly hard-hitting, as the narrator delivers a bitterly ironic envoi.