Critical Essay by Margot S. Kernan
Chabrol has found a rich mine of material in what he calls the "little themes," and [in La Femme Infidèle] he is working within a very narrow ra...
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Critical Essay by Robin Wood and Michael Walker
An artist lives in his art; that is, his art is characterised by the impulses, sympathies and recoils which determine his nature as a human being. Yet e...
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Critical Essay by Tom Milne
[La Rupture] is based on a thriller by Charlotte Armstrong about a woman, blameless in her marriage, whose small son is injured in a fight with her husband, and who subsequ...
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Critical Essay by Robert Giard
This Man Must Die (Que la Bête Meure) may be Chabrol's Iliad. It is, at least according to the description of that work given by the film's protagon...
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Critical Essay by John Belton
Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher explores the possibility (or impossibility) of love in a morally fatalistic universe. Working within the conventional context of a susp...
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Critical Essay by Diane Jacobs
At first glance Henry James' "Bench Of Desolation" seems an odd choice of subject matter for a Claude Chabrol film. A rather low-keyed short story p...
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Critical Essay by David L. Overbey
If Chabrol is to be believed, Les Noces Rouges … is the last film of his Balzacian comédie humaine of French society in the middle twentieth century. I...
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Critical Essay by Tom Milne
In a blue silk dressing-gown royally patterned in gold, the Minister of the Interior sits in his salon watching television. Just for a moment, as his private secretary hurr...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
To the French, the drama of adultery is what the Western is to Americans. And no Frenchman in recent times has churned out more of these dramas than Claude Chabrol, whose ...
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Critical Essay by Brian Davies
Claude Chabrol is a director who has managed to become more estranged from the critics with each film he makes….
It seems to me that Chabrol has been cast aside n...
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Critical Essay by Penelope Gilliatt
Passions that exist only in infirm half forms are a theme of ["Juste Avant la Nuit"]. Charles's fatal game with Laura is one of danger without ...
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Critical Essay by John Russell Taylor
Of all the filmmakers who emerged in the first flush of the French nouvelle vague during the mid-1950's, none has remained more of a problem to critics tha...
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Critical Essay by Douglas Mcvay
Several episodes [in Les Innocents aux Mains Sales] of legal skirmishing and police detective-work are at once verbosely expository and tiresomely facetious. Chabrol&#x...
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Critical Essay by Richard Combs
The last of Chabrol's films from the early Seventies to straggle into this country, Docteur Popaul arrives with a dauntingly unprepossessing reputation as a coar...
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Critical Essay by James Monaco
Chabrol owes a debt to Hitchcock, but there are significant differences between their universes. Chabrol himself in recent interviews has not missed an opportunity to su...
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Critical Essay by Gavin Millar
No one would pretend that Blood Relatives is vintage Chabrol, nor that it is a profound meditation on sexual relations and the family, sexual taboos and society. But Cha...
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Critical Essay by Isabel Quigly
In those ferocious discussions over Form and Content that shake the film world (well, bits of it) from time to time, in which the lunatic fringe on one side maintains t...
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Critical Essay by Robert Giard
If the cinema of Claude Chabrol is anything, it is glib. What could be more glib than that scene in The Third Lover [L'Oeil du Malin] in which the betrayed husban...
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Critical Essay by Richard Davis
Very few of us are really interested in an end of term or end of course thesis which is what [Bluebeard, or Landru] appears. There is no point of contact between the au...
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Critical Essay by Roy Armes
Claude Chabrol is assured of a place in any study of the new French cinema, for he was the first of the Cahiers group to make a feature film and as a producer gave Godard, ...
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Critical Essay by Gordon Gow
Chabrol, detached but perceptive, takes one of his coolest looks at the instability of human nature in Les Biches, a film which could have been made as an emotional drama ...
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