"Actor: Georges Chamarat"

• Diabolique | Blu Ray | (05/06/2017) from £17.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Legend has it that Henri-Georges Clouzot beat out Alfred Hitchcock to secure the rights to this novel, which proved to be a veritable blueprint for an icy masterpiece of murder, mystery and suspense. Véra Clouzot plays the sickly wife of a callous headmaster of a provincial boarding school going to seed, and the commanding Simone Signoret is the headmaster's mistreated mistress. Together they plot and carry out his murder, a brutal drowning that director Clouzot documents in chilly detail, but the corpse disappears and a nosy detective starts sniffing around the grounds as threatening notes taunt the women. Clouzot's thriller is as precise and accomplished a work as anything in Hitchcock's canon, a film of gruelling suspense and startling shocks in an overcast, grey world of decay, but his icy manipulations lack the human dimension and emotional resonance of the master of suspense. Many critics have accused the film of being misanthropic, and Clouzot's attitude toward his characters is bitter at best, contemptuous at worst. The viewer is left on the outside looking in, but the razor precision and terrifying twists deliver a sleek, bleak spectacle worthy of attention. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com

• Les Diaboliques | DVD | (25/02/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Director Henri-Georges Clouzot cast his own wife Vera as the hapless victim in this acclaimed masterpiece of the macabre. A wife plans the murder of her tyrant husband with the help of his mistress yet when his body dissappears panic and confusion ensues... The Great Suspense Film That Shocked the World... And Became A Classic.

• The Wing and the Thigh | DVD | (16/08/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.62

  In this comedy Louis de Funes is a top restaurant critic the head of an important French culinary guide. At the beginning of the film he and his son (Coluche) are at odds as the son prefers working as a circus clown to studying the fine arts of gastronomy. The two join forces however to thwart the greedy owner of a chain of inferior restaurants who plans to take over the finest restaurants in France and substitute his formulaic fodder for real cooking. Another lure bringing the son into the picture is a lovely secretary working for the guide.