- Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
- Written by Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Henri-Georges Clouzot
- Stars Simone Signoret, Vera Clouzot, Paul Meurisse
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 57 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzbGtjtfZwA
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This is an interesting snapshot of life in France in the 1950s. Horror Guy Kevin got kind of bored by the last third, but Horror Guy Brian was more forgiving.
Synopsis
We open at the DeLasalle Boarding School, and the food deliveryman drives in. The headmaster, Mr. Drain, heard screams coming from Nicole’s room. She’s one of the teachers and doesn’t care much for her boss. She tells her colleague Christine that Michel gave her a black eye last night at 3:00 a.m. Mr. Drain gossips with a colleague that he finds their friendship baffling, “The legal wife counseling the mistress.” We are told that Christina, “the mistress,” has a heart condition.
Michel comes into the room, and we see that he’s a bully to both of them. Christina complains to Nicole that divorce is a deadly sin, which is why they’re still married. Nicole has a plan, and they only have three days to make it happen. The fish at dinner is really sketchy, but he forces Christina to eat it.
Michel even bosses around Mr. Drain. Christina doesn’t like the way he runs her school; it’s her money and her school. Nicole mentions that she’s going away on vacation in the morning, Michel forces Christina, his unwilling wife, to have sex with him.
Apparently, everyone is going on vacation, the students and most of the staff pack up and leave. Late that night, the two women meet in the attic. Nicole has found a big wicker trunk and loaded it into their truck.
Mrs. Herboux is the nosy landlady where Nicole will be staying on vacation, and she watches the two women carry in the big trunk. Christina calls Michel and says she wants a divorce. Since the school was part of her dowry, she wants it all back. Michel says he’ll be there tomorrow to discuss things in person. Christina doesn’t seem too eager to go through with their plane, but she obviously thinks Nicole is right about the solution to their problem.
They put sedatives in the wine just before Michel arrives. Christina says they need to stop, “It’s too awful.” Nicole points out that after her phone call, it’s too late to turn back. “He’ll never know that I was the one who killed him,” Christina snarls.
Nicole goes downstairs to keep the Herbouxes distracted and busy, so they won’t see Michel coming in. Christina lets Michel in and they go to her room to discuss the situation. He had to sneak out of the school because chasing his wide was embarrassing; no one knows where he has gone.
Michael says Christina is too religious to start a divorce, but she convinces him that she could do it if she never remarries. He’s angry about the humiliation and scandal it would cause when she talks about his indiscretions. Plus, he’ll lose out on all her money and his place at the school.
Christina tries to get Michel to stop drinking the sedative, but when the conflict eventually devolves into him slapping her, she lets him guzzle the bottle. He soon passes out, as Nicole sneaks in the back door and fills up the bathtub.
The two women carry the unconscious Michel and drown him in the bathtub. Christina is terrified, so Nicole does most of the work. Christina has chest pains and must rest while Nicole puts a tablecloth over Michel and the tub.
Old man Herboux complains that the tub is too noisy and writes it down in his book of grievances. They end up tricking Herboux into helping them carry the much-heavier-now trunk out to their truck. Christina tells Nicole, “We are monsters.”
Mr. Drain wakes up when the women return to the school that night and need the gate opened. He was expecting Michel and the women say they didn’t know he wasn’t still there.
The women unload the body from the truck and dump it in the scuzzy old swimming pool. Christina just about has a heart attack from the effort but they make it work. Then they go inside and go to bed, returning from their vacation. Eventually, someone will find the body in the pool and assume he just fell in and drowned.
The other teachers immediately notice Michel is missing, so that cheers them up. Christina keeps watching the pool all through the school day, waiting for Michel to surface. He doesn’t. Christina wants to have the pool drained, but Nicole says that wouldn’t look normal and would cause suspicion.
So Nicole “accidentally” drops her keys in the pool, and one of the students has to dive in after them. The kid finds Michel’s lighter down there, but not his body (or the keys). Well, now it’s time to have the pool emptied!
Christina goes out to look at the empty pool and faints; there’s no body down there! The doctor says she’ll be fine but needs to avoid vexation. Nicole says the body has to be around here somewhere; who took Michel out of the pool?
The dry cleaner returns Michel’s suit—the suit he drowned in. How’d he get that? The woman at the cleaners describes Michel and points them to a hotel room for the man who brought them the suit. The cleaning man says Mr. DeLassalle doesn’t have any belongings, and he’s never there during the daytime.
Nicole asks, “He was really dead, wasn’t he?” Christina blames Nicole for planning the whole thing. They argue about which of them the courts would convict. They decide it’s probably best to wait and see what happens.
No, Christina decides to turn herself in, but Nichole finds in the newspaper that they found a naked body in the river—that’s gotta be him somehow. Christina goes to the morgue to identify the body—it’s not him. A policeman rides in the taxi with her and asks a few questions. He wants to know why she didn’t report her husband as missing.
Nicole watches Christina and Detective Fichet walking back to the school. His first guess is that Michel ran off with another woman. Both women talk to the detective, who just won’t shut up and leave. A little boy is working in the yard, and he says the principal, Michel, told him to do it. No one else has seen Michel.
Christina is terrified of being caught and gets sick, but Nicole insists it’s all coincidence. Nicole injects Christina with something to help her sleep. The doctor comes again and says that she overdid it and needs to relax for a while. The doctor tells his assistant later that she’s probably going to die soon.
Nicole finds Michel in the back of a school photo taken this morning, and she wants to leave town. Christina says her health won’t let her go along.
That night, as Christina sleeps, Detective Fichet comes into her room. He says he found Michel, but she says that’s impossible because she killed him! She tells him everything, including Nicole’s involvement. He says she needs a stronger sedative and leaves.
Later, she awakens again and goes out into the hallway. She hears footsteps in the dark. “Who’s there?” There are sounds coming from Michel’s office. Suddenly, the lights go out, and she runs back to her room. She gets back to her room and finds dead-Michel in her bathtub. As he sits up, she has a massive heart attack and dies.
Michael removes his dead-looking contact lenses and checks his dead wife’s pulse. He then calls Nicole in; she was in on the plot from the start. They talk about how they faked the whole thing. “Now, we’re rich!” he says.
Except then Detective Fichet comes out of the shadows and arrests them both for murder. He heard the whole thing!
Commentary
I saw the 1996 remake when it came out, so I already knew the ending for this one, which took a lot away from the experience this time. There’s no lesbian subtext in this one, although at one point Christina tells Michel that she and Nicole share a bed; he laughs.
This window into 1950’s France is pretty cool. It’s a lot different from British films of the time. Kevin said the last third felt long and stretched out, but I thought it was pretty good on its own—as long as you don’t know what’s coming.