An upstart critic for Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s and a financial force behind early French New Wave films in the early 60s, Claude Chabrol himself became a key director of the movement, Chabrol's filmmaking career spans nearly 35 years and some 45 films. They range from uninspired commercial projects (1964's "Marie-Chantal Contre le Docteur Kha"), to costly financial flops (1962's "Bluebeard"), to some of the darkest and most penetrating studies of obsession and, especially, murder ever to reach the screen.
Chabrol had just co-written, with Eric Rohmer, his celebrated monograph on "Hitchcock" (1957) and was working as a critic for CAHIERS DU CINEMA when money from his wife's inheritance allowed him to leave the magazine and make his first film, "Le Beau Serge/Bitter Reunion" (1958). A tragic, rural drama shot in black-and-white, "Le Beau Serge" helped define the New Wave of filmmaking that would posit the "auteur," or director, as key creator of his or her cinematic work.
Chabrol immediately followed "Le Beau Serge" with the equally dark and cruelly ironic "Les Cousins/The Cousins" (1959), a decadent tale of Parisian student bohemians. Again Chabrol served up the New Wave hallmarks of realism and intimacy, informal, sometimes iconoclastic, style and bold content. Jean-Claude Brialy starred as the cousin who is as evil as he is appealing; the Brialy character was the first of many ambiguous Chabrol creations who would subvert traditional concepts of the "bad guy".
The financial success of "Les Cousins" allowed Chabrol to set up AJYM, his own production company, which financed the first films of Rohmer, Philippe De Broca and Jacques Rivette. Chabrol's own next films as a director, however, did not fare well at the box-office.
The highly stylized "A Double Tour/Leda" (1959) and "Les Bonnes Femmes" (1960) dealt with psychopaths and underlined the director's fascination with murder. The commercial disappointment of the expensive "Landru/Bluebeard" (1962), however, based on the story of the real-life murderer, made it difficult for Chabrol to find backing for his own projects. In the Hollywood tradition, he became a director-for-hire, crafting a number of lightweight films which included several spy spoofs.
Chabrol enjoyed his "golden era" in the late 60s, triumphing with a string of highly successful thrillers noted for their subtlety and quiet yet momentum-building dramatic power: "La Femme infidele/Unfaithful Wife" (1968); "Que la Bete Meure/This Man Must Die!" (1969); and "Le Boucher" (1969). Both "Les Biches/The Girlfriends" (1967) and "La Rupture/The Breakup" (1970), though not strictly thrillers, explored the director's signature themes of obsession and compulsion. Ironically, one of Chabrol's biggest commercial successes of the 60s was one of his least favorite films--"La Ligne de Demarcation" (1966), a drama about French Resistance heroes which he deemed "naive."
It was also during this period that Chabrol cemented long-standing professional relationships, including those with cinematographer Jean Rabier, actress Stephane Audran (who had appeared in "Les Cousins" and whom Chabrol married in 1964), leading man Michel Bouquet, character players Attal and Zidi, composer Pierre Jansen and screenwriter Paul Gegauff, who co-scripted "Les Cousins." The celebrated Chabrol/Gegauff collaborations often reflected a cynical view of relationships and of the bourgeois values that fostered hypocrisy and violence. (Ironically and tragically, Gegauff was brutally murdered by his wife in 1983.)
After a number of professional frustrations and disappointments in the 70s, Chabrol turned to TV work. He resumed his theatrical career toward the end of the decade with the stunning features, "Violette" (1977)--another real-life tale of murder--and "The Horse of Pride" (1979), a poetic look at Breton peasant life.
From 1984 to 1987, Chabrol teamed with producer Marin Karmitz to make a trio of Hitchcockian thrillers, "Poulet au vinaigre/Cop Au Vin" (1985), "Inspector Lavardin" (1986) and "Masques" (1987). The two collaborated again in 1988 on the critically acclaimed "Story of Women," a bleak tale of a woman (Isabelle Huppert) who performs illegal abortions in order to support herself during the Nazi occupation of France.
His film adaptation of "Madame Bovary" (1991), lushly realist and unlike the many other films to use Flaubert's text, was obsessively true to the text--and thus received a lukewarm critical reception as ornate and lifeless. Also starring Isabelle Huppert, the cold pageantry of "Bovary" was something of a dull echo of the chilling immediacy of his strangely similar, earlier work, "Story of Women". The hardest working of Frenchman subsequently directed a documentary, "The Eye of Vichy" (1993), and two features, "Betty" (1992) and "L'enfer" (1994), in the early 90s.
With a typically Gallic zest for life and moral inquiry, Chabrol has largely worked in his native land and language. His films have taken him to the far corners of his own country--Brittany, Provence, Alsace, etc.--as much, it has been said, for the fine cuisine as the fine locations. Chabrol has, however, also directed several films in English, including "Ten Days Wonder" (1972), "The Twist" (1976) and the 1984 HBO made-for-cable feature, "The Blood of Others".