Master of French suspense: Henri Georges Clouzot

If you like Hitchcock movies, you’ll love the French master of cinematic suspense, Henri Georges

Clouzot. Born November 20, 1907 in Niort, France, Clouzot became interested in films from a young age. At the age of 18, Henri moved to Paris to pursue his studies as a writer; his talent and passion for writing led him to begin his career in cinema. From Paris he moved to Berlin where he translated German scripts to French in a studio in Berlin.

During the 1930s, Clouzot established his career as a screenwriter until he contracted tuberculosis, which halted his career for five years. During his stay in the sanatorium, Henri Georges developed his craft of showing the depth and complexity of movie characters, which would later catapult his cinematic career. In 1940, during World War II, Clouzot was desperate for money, and reluctantly accepted a job at Continental Films for screenwriting during the German Occupation; he would later début as a movie director.

At the overturn of the Vichy regime at the end of the war, the French charged Clouzot as a German collaborator and he was sentenced to a lifelong ban on film making. Due to the support of other well-known French film makers, Henri Georges’ sentence was reduced to a ban of merely two years, and in 1947, Clouzot’s career as a filmmaker took off. Some of his most well-known and award-winning suspense thrillers were: Quai des Orfèvres (1947), The Wages of Fear (1953), and Les Diaboliques (1955).

He made an extraordinary documentary of Pablo Picasso in the process of creating and painting called Le Mystère Picasso (1955), which has been classified a national treasure by the French government and was unique on several fronts. When Picasso is drawing in charcoal or pencil, Cluzot filmed in black and white, but when Picasso paints, Cluzot filmed in color. Even more intriguing, the painted glass works which Picasso created during the film were destroyed afterwards, in such a way that they exist only through the documentary.

Many of Cluzot’s films served as material for remakes; The Wages of Fear was remade in 1977 as Sorcerer by William Friedkin, and Les Diaboliques was remade as Diabolique in 1996 by Jeremiah S. Chechik.

Clouzot’s talent for suspenseful cinema was virtually unrivaled, and still continues to captivate audiences today. Robert Bloch, the author of the novel Psycho, (made into film by Hitchcock) stated in an interview that his all-time favorite horror film was Les Diaboliques.