1967 - THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS, is not one of the better Chabrol films

Claude Chabrol filmed this thriller about murder in a family running a champagne vineyard.  This film was shot simultaneously in French and English.  The English version which I saw is a little shall we say stilted.

The story is also very slow moving with things finally picking up during the second half of the film.  Chabrol was usually compared to Hitchcock when he moved into the suspense genre but Chabrol himself felt that Fritz Lang was more of an influence on his films.

The cast of The Champagne Murders included Stephanie Audran, Chabrol's wife at the time and Anthony Perkins which probably had a lot to do with comparing this film to a Hitchcock thriller. 

Not the best Chabrol film that I have seen but it has it's moments particularly the stunning overhead shot towards the end of the film. 

105 minutes, written by four writers, never a good sign, William Benjamin, Claude Brule, Derek Prouse and Paul Gegauff.

1987 - MASQUES another Claude Chabrol hate letter to the French bourgeois

Not the best Chabrol I've seen but not bad.  Philippe Noiret is a game show host who's one of those jolly good fellow type of guys.  Since this is a Claude Chabrol film he has a few skeletons in his closet. 

Chabrol's very smooth style is once again in action.  Everything is well staged and photographed.  All the actors give good performances.  Where he gets into trouble is with his story, with the exception of Noiret most of the characters are underdeveloped and the mystery part of the story is kind of uninteresting.

Masques is well made and not bad, however for a suspense thriller it's a little lazy.   Noiret gets to give a great "screw you" speech at the end of the film as things are closing in on him which is fun to watch.

100 minutes written by Odile Barski and Claude Chabrol.

2004 - THE BRIDESMAID, a thriller that would have made Hitchcock jealous

At the age of 76, Claude Chabrol directed this very good thriller about a middle class French family and in particular the son, who get involved with a very strange woman.  Philippe becomes infatuated with one of the bridesmaids at his sister's wedding.  After sleeping with Philippe the bridesmaid, Senta informs him that they have been joined by fate to be together forever.  That should have have been a big warning sign to the horny and smitten Philippe.

Claude Chabrol makes smooth thrillers, after 53 films his technique is so good it's a pleasure to watch the story unfold with his emphasis on character instead of set pieces.  Chabrol has always been labeled the French Hitchcock, but Hitchcock in his 70's was turning out mediocre junk like Topaz, and Family Plot certainly nothing like this.

The focus may be on this creepy relationship, but Chabrol also  looks at this equally screwed up French family.  In some of his previous films, the family unit has been shown as extremely less than ideal role models and in The Bridesmaid this family doesn't seem like a particularly emotionally healthy group.

 The Bridesmaid is another fine film from a master director about the darker side of middle class society and human nature. Whatever Chabrol's feelings about class, values and society, he is a skillful enough storyteller to keep this film very interesting.

 Hitchcock stopped making interesting films after Psycho and pretty much slipped into rehashing and reworking ideas and set pieces from his previous films during his Universal period.  It's unfortunate he wasn't able to grow and further develop as an artist the way Claude Chabrol has in 70's.

The Bridesmaid is a very fine and impressive character driven thriller from a master of the genre.

111 minutes.

2003 - THE FLOWER OF EVIL Happy families

Claude Chabrol the " French Hitchcock" takes a look at a Bourgeoisie French family with a lot of secrets.  The mother and father are a couple who remarried after their respective spouses (who were brother and sister) have died. 

The mother has political ambitions and is neglecting her spouse as she runs around making phony promises to the voters. The father has some sort of shady pharmaceutical business going on and secretly despises his wife's run for mayor. Their children are cousins (or half cousins or brother and sister or half brother and half sister) and are having a semi secretive incestuous affair. Even the family's saintly old Aunt has a big secret she's been hiding in her past.

Chabrol very subtly rips apart their respectability and shows the rotten moral core of the family.

Chabrol opens the film with a dead body then flashes back to show how the body got there. He also stages a scene with people trying to move the body around. Hitchcock would have taken a scene like this and shoot it with plenty of fancy camera angles and editing to create a showy moment for one of his films. Chabrol just shoots the scene in a fairly straightforward manner which emphasizes how difficult it is to just plain drag a dead body around the house.

Hitchcock's films could sometimes be full of set pieces with the characters stuck in the plot only to move around to the next set piece. Claude Chabrol can do the suspense stuff about as well as Hitchcock but he builds his films around his characters, something Hitchcock always seemed to struggle with.

104 minutes, written by Caroline Eliacheff, Louise L. Lambrichs and Claude Chabrol.