Luis Saslavsky, Les louves, 1957
Allow me to quote at some length (and correct a few spelling mistakes) from an otherwise good IMDb user review by one dbdumonteil: "Aside from Hitchcock's Vertigo and Clouzot's Diaboliques which are still unsurpassed, the best adaptation of a Boileau-Narcejac novel for the screen. Whereas th[os]e two masters completely rewrote the stories, the screenplay of Les Louves was reworked by the novelists themselves. This is an absorbing suspense from the railroad tracks at dawn where you've got to watch out for trains going nowhere to that house in the country where the hero feels that he is fading little by little." (Skipping the spoilers here..) "Saslavsky has a dream of a cast, his four leads being part of the crème de la crème of French actors: François Perier as the unfortunate victim who will discover that there's much more worse than a prisoners' camp; Micheline Presles as his penfriend [..] but isn't it strange that a woman takes a man she's never met before to be her husband?; Jeanne Moreau as Presles's sister and Madeleine Robinson as the dead soldier's sister, who welcomes the impostor as "her dear little Bernard" [...] This fabulous quartet takes the film out on a level of stratospheric intensity. Often filmed in close shots, their faces are like disturbing masks. Their eyes are always telling lies and the viewer, caught with them in a devilish trap, needs a breath of fresh air after the last sequence, to be avoided by people suffering from claustrophobia." Agreed with all of the above, but not his conclusion: "This is another fine French film noir of the fifties, when the genre was thriving before the new wavelet [sic] butchered it." No, the New Wave folks just took it to another level - and in any case noir, or neo-noir as it came to be called, was alive and well through the 70s and into the 80s. But anyway, back to Les Louves, also known it seems as Demoniac (rather awful attempt to play off some reference to the Clouzot?) - definitely up there with Vertigo and Diaboliques but, once more, only available in a French-only rip of rather substandard quality. Let's hope someone gives it the Eau à la Bouche treatment (see above) soon, because it's a great little film.
I'll even forgive you for not putting it in the YouTube thread (which you should probably do anyway, as I imagine more people read that than the RWF threads) - anyway, continuing the antipodean theme, finally:
