Les Diaboliques

One of the cinema s greatest suspense masterpieces, Henri-Georges Clouzot s Les Diaboliques made such an impression on Alfred Hitchcock that he borrowed its writers for Vertigo and attempted to recreate its clammy, seedy atmosphere in Psycho, substituting a motel-room shower for a boarding-school bathtub. Véra Clouzot and Simone Signoret are the wife and mistress of sadistic headmaster Paul Meurisse. When his unpleasant games go too far, they hatch the perfect plot to get rid of him: they drown him in the bath and dump him in the overgrown and evil-smelling pool, agreeing to claim that it was an accident. But when they have it drained, the body has vanished, and that s when nerves really start jangling especially when they spot increasingly hard-to-ignore signs that he might still be alive. Worse, a retired police inspector (Charles Vanel) takes pity on the bereaved widow and offers to help track her husband down...English subtitles