Literary adaptations of the 1950s Thrse Raquin (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955)

Susan Hayward
Abstract
In this article I want to examine two lms starring Simone Signoret. My interest in them is twofold. First, the radical shifts from the original texts raise interesting questions in relation to the process of adaptation. In Thrse Raquin the original Zola text is virtually reversed in meaning; in Les Diaboliques, the queerness seeps out despite a heterosexualizing of the original lesbian text. Second, this article will examine the interface between the star body and literary adaptations - how the star persona inuences or, conversely, is straightjacketed by the deviation from the original literary text. In his lm version of Thrse Raquin, which he updated to the contemporary times (early 1950s), Carn took interesting liberties with the original prototypes in so far as he made his protagonists much softer versions than their earlier referents. Thrse is represented as the victim of her circumstances, stuck in a marriage out of gratitude to Camilles mother who took her in as an orphan. She is not the scheming, avaricious Thrse of the novel. No more is Laurent. Indeed, as he pleads with Thrse to leave Camille and run away without further delay, he embodies almost the existentialist desire for freedom, to live each day as authentically and as fully as possible, to not be bound by convention nor a false sense of duty and, even less, an attachment to a certain bourgeois well-being that is riddled with mauvaise foi. The ill-fated couple never schemed to murder Camille. Thrse makes every attempt to do the decent thing by her husband and nd a humane way to leave him, starting by telling the truth - as she says to Laurent, I havent yet learnt how to lie. For this reason she even consents to go to Paris with Camille to see if they can save their marriage. It is only because of Laurents impetuousness that Camille ends up dead. Unable to bear the idea of her going to Paris with Camille, Laurent jumps on the train and attempts to take her away with him. In the ensuing struggle Camille falls to his death from the train. Ultimately, his death in the lm is an accident, not a premeditated crime as in the novel. Michel Perez makes an interesting point about the shifts in this lm. He believes Carn portrays the passion between Laurent and Thrse with an energy which has a moral nobleness to it that cannot help but be violent if the lovers aspire to the desire to be free (Perez 1986: 22). Thrse desires freedom, but not as it turns out at any price, nor indeed at the cost of poverty. We are made conscious throughout the lm of a certain caution in Thrse when it comes to matters of economic security. Thus, although there is the expression of mutual desire within the lm version of Zolas novel (unlike the original where it is one-sided), she is also more afraid of it than Laurent. This
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is partly because it is so unfamiliar to her and partly because, if she were to run away with him, she would lose nancial security (one of the prime reasons she agreed to get married to Camille in the rst place). She also makes the point to Laurent that gratefulness and pity keep (her) chained to Camille. Her ambivalence means she cannot, in her passion, aspire to freedom through violence (unlike Laurent who acts impulsively and often erupts irrationally). She is, therefore, incapable of such acts as premeditated murder, unlike her counterpart in Zolas novel whose lust for Laurent leads her to agree to murder Camille. Carns Thrse remains ambivalent throughout, enigmatic even, as if this newly discovered passion is almost beyond her. When we rst meet her she is quite frumpily dressed in a dreary overcoat, sensible hat and sturdy shoes, all of which more bet a middle-aged woman of the 1950s period than a young woman. We sense her lack of zest for life. At home she wears sombre clothes, almost as if in mourning for her lost self. When she is in the apartment above the shop most often she is to be found wearing a pinafore and carpet slippers. Her hair is rigorously kept in place in a half-chignon heavily clasped with a thick tortoiseshell hair-grip. There is not a stray hair in sight. Only once she has enjoyed sexual passion with Laurent does her hair come down, her clothing give way to a sensual white blouse revealing just a tiny bit of cleavage. And this is maintained for just the briefest of times. This undone-ness lasts from the rst sexual encounter, which occurs just under a quarter of the way into the lm (25 minutes in), until Thrses departure with Camille to Paris which takes place two-fths of the way through the lm (42 minutes in, some 17 minutes later). After that time and for the rest of the lm - that is to say, the next three-fths - she is back to her former attire. As she says to Laurent: I only know how to do sad things: sewing, looking after people, counting money. As for him, she adds, all he wants is everything, like happy people do . In a poignant way the mise-en-scne makes this point for us about Thrse: how can she aspire to this violence in passion Perez speaks of since her whole life is (and has always been) as ordered as the drapery shop she runs with her mother-in-law? The immaculate, but bleak and austere tidiness of the shop is matched by the overwhelmingly gloomy atmosphere of the apartment above, created by the ponderous provincial nineteenth-century furniture. If it is airless below, it is even more ferociously stuffy above where there is too much furniture and where the soft furnishings, from the thick velvet curtains and the embossed tapestry wallpaper to the heavy lacy net curtains and oil-cloth tablecover, literally pinion Thrse into her place of submission. All passion is surely going to be starved or suffocated in this environment. In Zolas novel the shop, which is a haberdashery and small-wares business, is described as lthy and unkempt. This dirt and slovenliness is directly associated with Thrse, whose name adorns the signboard outside. Everything is neglected, objects in the window are faded by the sun. The quality of the goods is lamentable (Zola 1953: 16). We are a far cry from the lmic version of Thrses establishment with its neatness and order and tidy bolts of quality cloth which she constantly smooths and refolds. Zolas Thrse is presented to
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us as physically deeply unattractive. Indeed, Laurent when he rst encounters her nds her ugly and only begins the affair with her so he can get sexual gratication for free. Zolas Thrse is described to us as completely unappetizing. Her face for example is white, dry, thin-nosed and thin-lipped, her body skinny and wiry (Zola 1953: 17) - hardly adjectives to qualify her reincarnation in the bodily form of Simone Signoret. Ugliness and dirt typify Zolas Thrse; whereas order, cleanliness and dormant sensual beauty qualify Carns version. We must recall that Zola was part of a group of authors known as the naturalists and that he was fascinated by what he termed a scientic interest in physiology. Each chapter of his Thrse Raquin, he tells us (Zola 1953: 7), is a case study in abnormal physiology. Zola wanted to investigate, in a scientic way, the human temperament in people who are dominated by their blood and nerves - people who are without free will but who are driven by their fateful corporeality (be it the result of generations of alcoholics or in-breeding or bad blood through miscegenation as is the case for Zolas Thrse) (Zola 1953: 67). Zolas central characters (Thrse and Laurent) are without a soul, human brutes, no more no less. Their physiology is what drives them; there is no pretence at intelligence. Carns characters are a far remove from this. Thus, we witness Thrses intelligence shining through as she desperately tries to save the situation. Moreover, we feel sympathy for her, trapped as she is in a marriage that deadens her soul. We also understand Laurents frustration as he tries to persuade her that they can lead a better life together. We even sympathize with the two of them when they accidentally kill Camille. Carns Laurent loves only Thrse. He is not driven by economic self-interest to the point of concocting a plan to murder Camille (as he is in the novel). Rather, he is a hard-working lorry driver. He is a foreigner, Italian; a stranger, therefore, and not, as in Zolas novel, an old schoolboy friend of Camilles. Carns Laurent is emblematic of the authentic, hard-working immigrant working class (last seen in Renoirs 1933 lm Toni), not the philandering lazy would-be artist of Zolas text. Finally, in this context of shifts in characterization, we sympathize with Thrse because of the awfulness of her mother-in-law. Here, she is frighteningly possessive of her sickly son, and even before Camille dies she has very little regard for her niece; Thrses only use in her eyes is that she will act as a guarantee of continued care for her son once she dies. In the novel, conversely, Camilles mother is a sweet if rather nave woman who loves her niece and wants only the happiness of her son through marriage to this young woman. When Camille is murdered, so duped is she to the nature of the crime and its perpetrators (she believes it is a boating accident) that she warmly encourages Thrse and Laurent to marry and even goes to the point of bestowing her entire fortune on her niece as a dowry. In other words, as opposed to the novel (where all is internally and physiologically [pre]determined), a plethora of external reasons are provided within the lms narrative to explain why Thrse is open to the pull of sexual desire and to show how frustration precipitates the fatal accident. We are very far removed from Zolas eugenics here. For example, there is no mention in the
Literary adaptations of the 1950s Thrse Raquin (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955)

lm of Thrses miscegenated blood to which Zola refers as that African blood burning through her veins (Zola 1953: 59). We are also far removed from his notion of fatalistic corporeality (the idea that the personages are doomed through bad blood to commit terrible crimes). Instead, Carn produces a third person, the blackmailing sailor, as the instrument of fate. He externalizes the inner fatal drive that Zola speaks of and gives human form to it. In so doing, Carn deprives the narrative of its original motivation. Equally, in making his two central characters sympathetic, he changes Zolas intentionally moral tale, about the gruesome but inevitable psychological tension between two people governed by bad blood and genetic greed, into a melodrama with a thriller twist. Frustration and repressed desire drive these characters, not inner aws. Thus, Carns characters are unlucky not to nd happiness, whereas Zolas merit the terrible end they meet (they commit a double suicide). Carns adaptation reverses the dynamics of the original text and makes Camille and his mother the embodiments of nastiness and meanspiritedness. It is this scheming duo who behave dishonourably in their plot to keep Thrse prisoner once they are told by the more than honourable Laurent about his love for Thrse. Andr Bazin was right to see this version as a betrayal of Zolas text (Bazin 1953: 23). And this betrayal is perpetuated by the casting of the central characters. Signorets luminous intelligence was never going to allow her to embody the raw bestiality of Zolas Thrse. Vallones exotic otherness and Italian Communist Party credentials place him a long way away from the crude and avaricious Laurent of the novel; it is as if, peculiarly, the exotic of the original Thrse (due to her miscegenated blood) has been transposed onto Vallones Laurent. Indeed, Vallones foreigness, arguably, makes him more exotic as a source of spectator pleasure than Signoret. I say arguably because the two are wonderfully matched in their rst kissing scene where he rst kisses her and then she, so obviously hungry for more, returns the kiss with intense fulsomeness. The cleanliness and order of Thrses environment, matched as it is by her own neatness, reects the stiing nature of provincial France in the 1950s. Although set in Lyon, this town is an abstract anonymous one that could be anywhere in the northern half of France. Signorets actorly body evokes the effects of this monotonous, claustrophobic and petty world in a number of ways. First, through the measured, efcient and crisp manner with which she executes certain gestures she shows how ingrained this conforming behaviour is and how routinized her life has become (for example, smoothing down and then folding the bolts of cloth away, winding the iron curtain down each night, setting the table at mealtimes). Second, the spaces through which she has to move almost consistently have her contained or trapped. Thus, for example, she is shot either in medium or long shot as she ascends the spiral wrought-iron staircase that leads up to the apartment. In the medium shot, she is seemingly caged within the spiral; in the long shot, trapped within her own loneliness (evoked by the emptiness of the mise-en-scne). When in her room upstairs she can only look out onto the street below through the small square panes in the windows which keep her prisoner. Later, towards the very end of the lm,
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when all is lost, she peers through slats of the Venetian blinds. The slats are lit in such a way that they form bars across her face, again imprisoning her. Finally, she barely speaks during the lm. Her virtual silence is broken just the once when she tells her now mute and paralysed mother-in-law how dreadfully abused she has been by her and her son. This monologue lasts three and a half minutes. This is her longest delivery throughout the entire lm and it is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, we could reasonably expect such a momentous moment of volubility on her part to be reserved for Laurent (for example, in a declaration of love). Second, it represents Thrses single violent outburst. Her violence then is reserved not for her passion, but for a lengthy declamation on the abuse she has felt of her rights as a woman; as she declares vehemently to her mother-in-law, I am young, I am alive. Indeed, she is not meant to be buried under all this submission. Carns updating the lm to the contemporary scene of the 1950s means we can read Thrses statement within the context of the times. Even though women were by this time able to vote and were therefore (ofcially) enfranchised, they were still far from free - and once married they were moreover, as Thrse so rightly points out, their husbands chattel. She depends on Camille for nancial security. Her job provides her with no income, all of that goes into the family pot. It is also worth making the point that, in terms of the law governing marital status, the wife was not free to nd work elsewhere unless her husband gave his permission for her to do so (this law was not rescinded until 1965; see Lehmann 1965: 7). So Thrse, who is so tyrannically ruled by both her mother-in-law and her husband, is unlikely to nd a route out to freedom through work elsewhere (as Camille insists at one point you are my wife and you have to do as I say, the law is on my side). She not only has to run the shop for no remuneration, but also the household upstairs. Again, as Thrse exclaims, this constitutes an exploitation of her labour. Small wonder she is depressed and feels down-trodden - a state to which her carpet slippers so admirably attest - of course she is trapped into this marriage, how can she possibly make her escape with a man (Laurent) who has no means to support her? Their difference in class is just one more oppressive nail in the cofn of their love affair. Signicantly, then, when she does come to speak, to break her silence and assert her voice (her voix, meaning in French her voice but also her right to vote, her enfranchisement), she speaks of what matters to her and she speaks it to one who cannot answer her back but who is obliged to listen her mother-in-law (who very much upholds patriarchal law). If we return to Perezs comment about violence and passion and the desire to be free, where Thrse is concerned we can now read her passion as a desire rst and foremost for her own freedom including the assertion of her own rights without which (as she readily acknowledges) she is not free to pursue love. This question of the female voice becomes signicantly more complex in Les Diaboliques/The Fiends (Clouzot, 1955). This time Signorets performance challenges the xity of female sexuality despite Clouzots attempt to straightjacket it by heterosexualizing the original lesbian text (written by Boileau and Narcejac, Celle qui ntait plus). In the novel, it is the two women who are
Literary adaptations of the 1950s Thrse Raquin (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955)

In 1954 the PCFs womens weekly Heures Claires des Femmes Franaises spoke very favourably of the utilitarian nature of this day dress that was in vogue during that year (no. 509, 4 November 1954, p. 14).

lovers seeking to eliminate the husband so they can run away together. In Clouzots version it is the mistress and her male lover who plot to do away with the wife. However, as we shall see, the lesbian text seeps through. The wife (Christina/Vera Clouzot) is married to the ruthless and sadistic headmaster (Michel/Paul Meurisse) with whom she runs a private boarding school just outside Paris. Nicole (Signoret), a maths and science schoolteacher (as opposed to a doctor in the original), is cast as the headmasters lover (and not as the wifes lover as in the novel). In the original story the two women plot to kill off the husband (who suffers from a weak heart). Clouzot reverses the tale and it is the husband and Nicole who plot against the wife who is now the one with a weak heart. In order for the plan to succeed, the mistress has to befriend the wife. This she does by ganging up with her against the husband who behaves quite brutally towards the two of them - even to the point of giving Nicole a black eye. His sadism also includes publicly humiliating his wife, forcing her to eat disgusting food and raping her. The two women enter into a complicit relationship against Michel, a complicity which, to the viewer, is utterly convincing since we do not know, until the very end of the lm, that Michel and Nicole were plotting to cause Christinas eventual heart attack. In other words, we are led to believe that what we are seeing is the truth, the duplicity being revealed only at the last minute. During this period of seeing what we believe to be the truth, we witness the close friendship between the two women. Indeed, as one schoolteacher remarks, although they should be rivals, in fact, they are close allies, something he nds abnormal. This closeness is clearly signalled by the number of twoshots of the women together (82 in all) as opposed to those of Michel and Nicole who are almost never in a two-shot (there are only 6), or again those of Michel with his wife (15). This female relationship then has greater visual importance than any of the others. Even the three-shots are few and far between which is unusual given that that there is a triangular relationship between these three main characters (there are only 11 three-shots). Thus, the actual framing of the characters lulls us into this belief that the relationship between Nicole and Christina is a close, primary and even intimate one. At one point the two women are framed in a bedroom window in their nightclothes; in the background a double bed is untidily unmade, as if slept in. Nicole is wearing dark pyjamas and Christina white ones. Nicole stands, as if protectively, behind Christina. They stand framed like any couple might. This light/dark motif which runs throughout warns us that not all is unambiguous. Nicole wears dark, severe utilitarian-styled dresses with straight skirts rmly belted at the waist, whilst Christina wears light coloured patterns with full skirts (which hint at her Latin-American origins).1 The only reversal in colouring is with the hair: Nicoles hair is blond and cropped short, whereas Christinas is long and dark. However, this reversal does nothing to undo the image of Christinas exotic foreignness and femininity as opposed to Nicoles more severe masculinized appearance. Thus, Christina comes over as the exotic fragile female and Nicole as a strong-willed, modern woman. Unlike Christina, who has given over her economic rights to Michel through mar10
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riage, Nicole is economically independent. She not only has a paid job, she is also a property owner. She is purposeful and no-nonsense - even hard-nosed and tough. Nicole smokes her cigarette in a masculine manner, pulling the butt from her mouth with her thumb and forengers and stamping it out on the ground with considerable force. She is quite masculinized therefore in relation to Christina. Furthermore, she teaches maths and sciences, hard male-identied subjects as opposed to Christinas, soft, language subjects (English). As the science teacher, it is she who obtains the sleeping draught and knows the right amount to put into the whiskey bottle, which only then will Christina be allowed to pour and serve to Michel. The roles are clearly dened here, and as far as we know it is Nicole who devised the crime. Not all is masculine in Nicole, however. Her black high-heels and deepred ngernails are, of course, markers within the thriller codes and conventions of her femme fatale status. Iconically speaking, then, she represents here the traditional femme fatale of the lm noir with her clothing marking her as the safely contained phallic woman. But this apparent investment in noir iconography stops dead in its tracks at this juncture with regard to Nicoles clothing. Other things intrude to stop it short. The carpet slippers she wears whilst carrying out the murder and, again, at the end of the lm, when she is nally apprehended for her crime, do enormous damage to her status as a sexy femme fatale. How can this homebody in any way be associated with the glamour of the phallic woman of the lm noir genre? Her gestures lose their extraordinariness, their excess. For, when she is supposedly at her most ritualistically phallic moment (killing the male), her dress code stresses her ordinariness. She is in carpet slippers (like her elderly tenant upstairs) and her dress is unbelted so that it hangs, totally unrevealing of any contours, like a shapeless housecoat. This is one way in which the iconographic coding is in conict. But there are others. The dark sunglasses she wears and the casually worn cardigan over the shoulders suggest a sporty persona (ready for tennis) not associated with the languorous femme fatale. And even that iconography (of sportswoman) is destabilized by the fact that Nicole knits (presumably for herself - a new white cardigan perhaps). Curiously, as if to give weight to this conictual or fragmented characterization, it is noteworthy that she is not the object of Michels investigatory gaze. She is not, therefore, the enigma that has to be unravelled which as a femme fatale she most assuredly would be. Indeed, this probing of the enigma itself gets fragmented. In the rst instance there is a reversal of this lm noir trope and it is Michel who, once he has been murdered, becomes the enigmatically vanished body that is the constant object of the two females searching gaze. And, in the second instance, it is the rather grubby, unkempt and sleazy-looking retired policeman turned private eye, Inspector Fichet (Charles Vanel), who probes and investigates Christina and not Nicole (the putative femme fatale) to get at the truth and resolve the mystery. Finally, in this series of role reversals, concerning the two men, to Michels rather feminized role (as the enigmatic evanescent body) corresponds Fichets own lack of sexualized masculinity (he is not the sexy private eye of noir tradition, even though of course his persistence nally pays dividends).
Literary adaptations of the 1950s Thrse Raquin (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955)

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To return to Signorets role as Nicole: when she walks, with her grand strides, she comes over as sexually powerful, predatory even. But here again there is something incomplete. As if she is lacking a target. There is no hint of passion between herself and Michel (in a sense there cannot be, or else the twist in the tail of the narrative would be given away). Thus, this power seemingly has to nd another outlet and this it does in the form of her relationship with Christina. Nicole/Signoret takes Queering this text: Signoret with wool charge of and has control over the and cats other woman, much as she does in the original novel. As such she occupies a masculine space which, in this instance, transforms their relationship into a simulacrum of the heterosexual couple. This is conrmed in a number of ways. First, on several occasions Nicole holds Christina from behind in a proprietorial way that is similar to the way Michel grabs hold of his wife (pinning her arms to her side). Second, she has arguments with Christina that are more like a couples tiffs than straightforward disagreements between friends or colleagues. For example, in one sequence the two women are sitting side by side marking the boys homework, trying to behave normally. But Christina keeps fretting about the crime. Nicoles silent seething at her partners feeble weakness eventually reaches breaking point and she begins to make all sorts of brutal gestures including violently throwing a pencil rubber over at her. In his review of this lm, Derek Prowse speaks of Signoret as big and dominating and Vera Clouzot as small and harassed (Prowse 1955-56: 149). Within these sets of contrasts, Nicole looms as the dark shadow to Christinas virginal translucence. Theirs is not quite a butch-femme relationship, however, even though it appears to come close. As we shall see, it meets with several twists that challenge this stereotype. Nicole orders Christina about magisterially, but also comforts her when she is abused by Michel. But, as with all the other embodiments mentioned above, the dramatic tension stops there and things start to contradict themselves and fragment as the lm tries to reassert its heterosexual bias. In a sense, the fact of heterosexualizing the narrative gets in the way of the plot having conviction, denaturalizes it, forces it to a series of grinding halts. Several critics of the time make the point that the plot is empty and absurd (see Prowse 1955-56; Anon. 1955; Theberge 1962). That is too harsh, although they do have a point that something does not quite gel (for the reasons I have suggested). The lm is full of suspense and minute observations that make it compelling to watch. And what makes it compelling to watch in particular are the moments when the complicity of the two women is forefronted. We get a grip on a narrative line that seems to be taking
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us somewhere - and that somewhere is into their relationship - but as soon as we move away, things become dislocated, contradictory even. Thus, the lesbian intertext is always co-present, clashing with the reinscription of the heterosexual one. Interestingly, even within the now straight version of the story, we are not totally without sympathy for these two women. For example, the murder scene where they drug and eventually drown Michel in the bathtub is a masterful piece of horror. And yet we believe we understand their motivation given how much they have suffered at the sadistic hand of this man of whom they are now (apparently) disposing themselves. Just as this lm uctuates uneasily between text and intertext (as described above), so too the narrative uctuates between two contradictory types of relationships. First, there is the intense same-sex relationship between Nicole and Christina. Second, there is the doubly-dosed sadomasochistic one between Michel and his wife on the one hand and Michel and Nicole on the other. In the novel there is no real match to this. We hardly meet up with the lesbian couple. Only at the end, once the twist in the plot is revealed, do we realize what their true relationship was, so nothing is developed there. Nor do we get much sense of the husband and wife relationship. The only point of comparison between the two texts, then, is the rather nasty dynamic between the doctor (Lucienne) and her supposed lover (the husband), which is the relationship that dominates the novels narrative. Meantime, Clouzot has lled his own lm text with an extraordinary set of relational mirrorings and complexities which make his narrative far denser and in excess of the original. And the primary reason for its greater density comes down to the complexity of Nicole and Christinas relationship.2 It can, as I have already explained, be seen as a simulacrum of the heterosexual relationship (so a rst inverted mirroring of sorts). However, it can equally be seen for what it is - albeit the lmic text tries to hide it away - namely, a lesbian relationship. It can also be seen as a motherdaughter relationship. Nicole takes care of Christina, she speaks to her at times as a mother would to a daughter. She patiently and meticulously explains why the murder must be done and why it must be done in a particular way. She is protective of Christinas sexual immaturity. She soothes her when Michel is cruel to her (and so on). Already, we are looking at three types of ambiguity here, unxing the social order of things. Nothing remains in place. Thus it should not surprise us that there is also a power shift within this same-sex relationship. Christina, who at rst seems so submissive to Nicoles dominant ways, takes the upper hand once the private detective gets involved in the story. Christina is still full of fear at her crime and will nally die terrorized by the mysterious haunting of her rooms by Michels ghost. However, until that moment of her death it is, paradoxically, Christina who takes charge (even dismissing Nicole from her sight) as the private detective becomes increasingly nosy with his questions. In fact, it is she who elds them with intelligence and Nicole who becomes more and more anxious. Of course, at the end of the lm we come to understand why Nicole reacts so badly to the detectives intrusive questions (because he might blow apart the scheme to cause Christinas death). But until then it looks as if there is a role reversal and
Literary adaptations of the 1950s Thrse Raquin (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955)

I have written elsewhere about the political resonances of this lm which is another source of its density (Hayward 2001).

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Christina has taken command of the situation. Thus, in this same-sex relationship, power relations shift, sexual positionings and sexuality itself shift (and, as we have seen, Michels positioning is equally far from stable). There is fragmentation and excess, both of which are played through the body and both of which function to challenge constructed orders, social restrictions, established laws and hierarchies as they relate to sexuality. Yes, Christina does die in the end and, yes, the two conspirators do get found out (unlike in the novel, incidentally, where we are left to believe that, having got away with the crime, maybe Lucienne will now get rid of her rather sickly lover, Mireille). So order of a sort is re-established in the concluding moments of the lm (by a very scruffy patriarch, the detective), but not before a great deal of social disruption has taken place in which gender norms are challenged. Sexual boundaries within this lm have been stretched (transgressed even) beyond the historical and ideological order in which it was produced (the mid1950s), a time of severe censorship and profound homophobia. Despite the lms unease as to its nature (as straight or queer), this was Signorets highestever scoring lm with an audience of 3.7 million. People go to see thrillers to be frightened. They also go because it is the chance to see a representation of the unrepresentable. The attraction lies in the challenge to the architectonics of social order, the carnivalesque disruption of knowable boundaries. And it is surely this that makes this lm still hold such fascination for audiences today.

References
Anon. (1955), Les Diaboliques, Variety. Hayward, S. (2001), Setting the Agenders: Simone Signoret The Pre-Feminist Star Body, Gender and French Cinema (eds. Alex Hughes and James S. Williams), Oxford: Berg, pp. 10723. Lehmann, A. (1965), Le Rle de la femme au milieu du vingtime sicle, Paris: dition de La Ligue Franaise pour le Droit des Femmes (3rd edition). Prowse, D. (1955-56), Les Diaboliques, Sight and Sound, 25: 3, p. 149. Theberge, P. (1962), Chri fais-moi peur/Darling Frighten me, Objectif, 2: 17, pp. 3738.

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