Director Henry-Georges Clouzot had a long reputation for absolute rigor - and perfectionism was often more applicable to his notoriously persnickety shooting methods than to results he actually achieved on the silver screen. Clouzot's films were particularly bleak, verging on nihilistic. Manon (1949) his interpretation of the Prevost novel Manon Lescaut (an erstwhile Puccini opera) updated to the twilight, post-war world of black-marketeers and clandestine refugee ships bound for Palestine, has at its center what must be the last sympathetic pair of young lovers in cinematic history.
The work that established Clouzot and earned him international acclaim was 1953's Wages of Fear, featuring an intense performance by Yves Montand , concerning a quartet of expatriate ne'er-do-wells assigned to transport a cargo of volatile nitroglycerin over the rickety and rutted roads of South America ending up with the grisly deaths of all four.
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| Just Deserts for these star-crossed lovers in 1949's Manon. |
With the exception of 1956's The Picasso Mystery, a straightforward study of the artist during his throes of creation, Clouzot's films were less successful artistically speaking though Les Diaboliques (1955) was a tremendous commercial hit in both France and abroad. Les Espions (The Spies,1957) was an uneven and pretensions spy thriller, undeniably intended to be Kafkaesque and even more apparently failing to do so. La Verite (The Truth, 1960), a court-room melodrama revealed the evolving nouvelle vague influence in its choice of theme, which was the amorality of contemporaneous youth and the star Brigitte Bardot was otherwise stamped with Clouzot's own stolid if efficient technique. After this box-office triumph his career would flounder until his death in the year 1977.