HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT’S INFERNO (L’Enfer de Henri–Georges Clouzot)

Dirs. Serge Bromberg, Ruxandra Medrea | France | 2009 | 94 mins – French w/ English subtitles

French director Henri-Georges Clouzot's reputation is founded on the classics The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les Diabolique (1955) and it might have been enhanced if he had completed his 1964 project, Inferno, about a jealous husband driven towards insanity. This fine documentary explains what went wrong – the director, having alienated cast and crew with his obsessive behaviour and then suffered a heart-attack - but it also unearths footage of camera tests and experiments in kinetic art and colouration that suggest how very remarkable the film might have been. At times, it recalls Hitchcock's use of optical trickery in Vertigo. Clouzot and his two stars, Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani, are all dead, though certain crew members are still around to reminisce about the director ("a schizophrenic maniac") and the doomed film. Enfer was its French title, and "hell" was what it became. Until its discovery and reconstruction, this remarkable dazzling footage had not been seen for forty years. - A. Quinn / The Independent