It is. No wonder Hitchcock wanted to make an English language version. His kind of stuff.
Really?
The cheap surprise ending (which was for me totally foreseeable) is clearly inferior to what Hitchcock had usually done with such a stuff. For me Les diaboliques was as a thriller a disappointing film. Similar to the ending of The Usual Suspects it was so idiotic that the film suffered from it. Hitchcock usually avoided these kind of endings, by giving away the “secret” after half or two thirds of the film’s runtime. If he kept it to the end, and against his aversion of whodunits he did some whodunits, than it worked, and it was really great, especially like in Psycho.
Hitchcock’s version would have been VASTLY superior. I doubt there would have been that much in common. I did feel LD had enough suspense in it to get the master interested but he chose to go with PSYCHO so all the better. One thing I would like to know was did he stop pursuing the idea because of TASTE OF FEAR.
Disaster struck when I couldn’t play my version of STOP ME BEFORE I KILL. It also means I cannot watch my copy of MANIAC either. So I will skip to PARANOIAC (1963) and NIGHTMARE (1964), the time where the company was firing on all cylinders. The influence of PSYCHO is more prevalent in these films. They were again. written by Jimmy Sangster but directed by THE INNOCENTS’ Freddie Francis, who gave them a more visual Flare.
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