Word: signoret
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...suicides ended the whole bloody business. The movie plucks the story from the hands of fate and throws it into the lap of chance. It moves the locale from the Left Bank of the Seine to the wrong side of the Rhone, where an impassioned Lyonnaise beauty (Simone Signoret), bored with an inadequate husband, meets "un homme, un vrai" in the form of an Italian truck driver (Raf Vallone). The lovers do not plot the husband's death, but they kill him anyway. After that, accidents keep following each other as if in mockery of Zola's thesis...
...might, by concentration on the emotion of the distraught wife. Some scenes are grotesque, but they are never offensively so. Paul Meurisse, brutal and dynamic, plays the lecher of women and money. Vera Clouzot, palpitating in guilt and disease, is morally both noble and weak as his wife. Simone Signoret, a Shelley Winters of the Champs Elysees, is calm and ecstatically vengeful. The composite is queer, probing, and quite perfect...
...bottom of an aquarium. The swimming pool is covered with a green scum; the magnificent halls are damp and echoing; the pupils riot over a dinner of sausage and potatoes. There are four teachers: two male nonentities and two striking women -frail Vera Clouzot and mannish but beautiful Simone Signoret. Headmaster Paul Meurisse is a reptilian thug who is married to Vera, keeps Simone as his mistress, and treats both of the women abominably...
...Simone Signoret has had enough. She flees, and Vera fatalistically awaits her end, aided only by stubble-bearded Charles Vanel, an ambiguous private detective with the disconcerting habit of turning up in her bedroom at midnight to report his progress. The terrors mount to the satisfying crescendo of a Gothic nightmare as Vera, haunted by predawn whispers, creakings and rustlings, retreats to her own bathroom, finds the tub filled with water and containing the staring body of her drowned husband. She dies of heart failure, and Director Clouzot brings his masterly thriller to a shocker of a conclusion that...
...that was turning the century without a break in its giddy stride. Director Max (Letter to an Unknown Woman) Ophuls has lovingly put together this wry ode to love, and brightened it with a galaxy of Continental stars: Anton Walbrook, Danielle Darrieux, Fernand Gravet, Simone Simon, Gerard Philipe, Simone Signoret, Isa Miranda...