Sunday
This is probably one of the best punk films ever. One of the most iconic films by Derek Jarman, Jubilee stars Jenny Runacre, and Ian Charleson; along with a few punk figures, such as Wayne County, or Jayne County, Toyah Willcox, and the very sexy Adam Ant. Queen Elizabeth I travels to late twentieth-century Britain to discover a tawdry and depressing landscape where life mostly seems aimless and held cheap. Three post-punk girls waste away their vacuous existence as best they can, from time-to-time straying to murder to relieve the boredom. Madly great.
The greatest film that Alfred Hitchcock never made! When director Henri-Georges Clouzot bought the film rights to the original novel, he reportedly beat Hitchcock by only a matter of hours. The film is based on Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac's novel "Celle qui n'était plus" (She Who Was No More). Hitchcock
also attempted to buy the rights to this novel; Boileau and Narcejac
subsequently wrote "D'Entre les Morts" (From Among the Dead) especially
for Hitchcock, who filmed it as Vertigo.
So this beautiful black and white is set in a second-rate boarding school run by the
tyrannical and mean Michel Delassalle (Meurisse). The school, though, is
owned by Delassalle's teacher wife, the frail Christina (Clouzot), and
Delassalle flaunts his relationship with Nicole Horner (Signoret), a
teacher at the school. Rather than antagonism, the two women are shown
to have a somewhat close relationship, primarily based on their apparent
common hatred of Michel, who is physically and emotionally abusive to
both. Unable to stand his mistreatment any longer, Nicole devises a plan.
Though hesitant at first, Christina ultimately consents to help Nicole.
Using a threatened divorce to lure Michel to Nicole's apartment building
in a remote village several hundred kilometers away, Christina sedates
him. The two women then drown him in a bathtub and dump his body in the
school's neglected swimming pool. The
simple murder plot then goes haywire, when Michel's corpse disappears,
prompting strange rumors of his reappearance which grow more and more
substantial as the film careens wildly towards its breathless
conclusion. Later remade as a greatly inferior 1996 Hollywood feature
with Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani. A dark, dank
thriller with a much-imitated "shock" ending, Diabolique (The Devils) is a
masterpiece of Grand
Guignol suspense!
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