#Boileau Narcejac

[bernamegeh]

Boileau Narcejac Kimdir

Boileau-Narcejac, Fransız polisiye edebiyatında önemli bir yere sahip iki yazarın oluşturduğu bir yazarlık ikilisidir.Pierre Boileau (1906-1989) ve Thomas Narcejac (1908-1998) tarafından kurulan bu ortaklık, özellikle gerilim ve suç romanları alanında dikkat çekmiştir.İkilinin yazıları, psikolojik gerilim unsurları ve beklenmedik olay örgüleri ile ünlüdür.Pierre Boileau, Paris’te doğdu ve genç…

[creepynostalgy]

Véra Clouzot and Simone Signoret on set of Les Diaboliques (1955)

[addictivecontradiction]

Les yeux sans visage, 1960

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac - The Living and The Dead - Arrow - 1965

[watcher-in-the-woods]

Diabolique (Les Diaboliques, 1955)

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot Written by Jérôme Géronimi and Henri-Georges Clouzot

Based on She Who Was no More, by Boileau-Narcejac

[randomrichards]

BODY PARTS (1991):

Post car accident

Man’s arm replaced with killer’s

Evil in the flesh?

[screamscenepodcast]

It's been a long time since your hosts have travelled to France! This week we cover LES YEUX SANS VISAGE (1960) aka EYES WITHOUT A FACE from director Georges Franju!

Based on the Jean Redon novel, the film stars Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli and Édith Scob. It delivers French New Wave horror while keeping you at arm's length -- but will that work in its favour?

Context setting 00:00; Synopsis 27:26; Discussion 35:33; Ranking 57:43

[mariocki]

Un témoin dans la ville (Witness in the City, 1959)

"I'll yell. I'll yell for help. The neighbours will come."

"The rich don't have neighbours, Mr. Verdier. Just trees surrounding their homes."

[7r0773r]

Vertigo by Boileau-Narcejac, translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury

At two he was waiting at the Etoile. She was always punctual.

'Ah!' he exclaimed. You're in black today.'

'I love black. If I had my own way I'd wear nothing else.'

'Why? It's a bit mournful, isn't it?'

'Not at all. On the contrary, it gives value to everything; it makes all one's thoughts more important and obliges one to take oneself seriously.'

'And if you were in blue, or green?'

'I don't know. I might think myself a river or a poplar... When I was little, I thought colours had mystical properties. Perhaps that's what made me want to paint.'

She took his arm, with an abandon that almost submerged him in a wave of tenderness.

'I've tried my hand at painting too,' he said. 'The trouble is, my drawing's always so weak.'

What does that matter? It's the colour that counts.'

'I'd love to see your paintings.'

'They're not worth much. You couldn't make head or tail of them: they're dreams really... Do you dream in colour?'

'No. Everything's grey. Like a photograph.'

'Then you couldn't understand. You're one of the blind!'

She laughed and squeezed his arm to show him she was only teasing.

'Dreams are so much more beautiful than the stuff they call reality,' she went on. 'Imagine a profusion of interweaving colours which penetrate right into you, filling you so completely that you become like one of those insects which make themselves indistinguishable from the leaf they’re resting on. . . Every night I dream of… of the other country.’

‘You too!’ (pp. 63-64)

[brokehorrorfan]

Alfred Hitchcock: The Iconic Film Collection will be released on November 26 via Universal. The 4K Ultra HD + Digital set collects six of the Master of Suspense's classic thrillers: Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds.

Limited to 5,150, the six-disc collection is housed in premium book-style packaging featuring artwork by Tristan Eaton along with photos, bios, and trivia.

The uncut version of Psycho is included. Special features are detailed below.

1954's Rear Window is written by John Michael Hayes (To Catch a Thief), based on Cornell Woolrich’s 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder." James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter, and Raymond Burr star.

Rear Window special features:

Audio commentary by Hitchcock’s Rear Window: The Well-Made Film author John Fawell

Rear Window Ethics - 2000 documentary

Conversation with Screenwriter John Michael Hayes

Pure Cinema: Through the Eyes of The Master

Breaking Barriers: The Sound of Hitchcock

Masters of Cinema

Hitchcock/Truffaut - Audio recording from filmmaker François Truffaut’s in-depth interview with director Alfred Hitchcock about Rear Window

Production photo gallery

Theatrical trailer

Re-release trailer narrated by James Stewart

A wheelchair-bound photographer spies on his neighbors from his apartment window and becomes convinced one of them has committed murder.

1955's To Catch a Thief is written by John Michael Hayes (Rear Window), based on David Dodge’s 1952 novel of the same name. Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Jessie Royce Landis, and John Williams star.

To Catch a Thief special features:

Audio commentary by Hitchcock historian Dr. Drew Casper

Filmmaker Focus: Leonard Maltin on To Catch a Thief

Behind the Gates: Cary Grant and Grace Kelly

A retired jewel thief sets out to prove his innocence after being suspected of returning to his former occupation.

1958's Vertigo is written by Alec Coppel (No Highway in the Sky) and Samuel A. Taylor (Sabrina), based on Boileau-Narcejac’s 1954 novel The Living and the Dead. James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, and Henry Jones star.

Vertigo special features:

Audio commentary by filmmaker William Friedkin (The Exorcist)

Obsessed with Vertigo: New Life for Hitchcock’s Masterpiece

Partners In Crime: Hitchcock’s Collaborators

Saul Bass: Title Champ

Edith Head: Dressing the Master’s Movies

Bernard Herrmann: Hitchcock’s Maestro

Alma: The Master’s Muse

Foreign censorship ending

100 Years of Universal: The Lew Wasserman Era

Hitchcock/Truffaut - Audio recording from filmmaker François Truffaut’s in-depth interview with director Alfred Hitchcock about Vertigo

Theatrical trailer

Restoration theatrical trailer

A former police detective juggles wrestling with his personal demons and becoming obsessed with a hauntingly beautiful woman.

1959's North by Northwest is written by Ernest Lehman (The Sound of Music, West Side Story). Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Jessie Royce Landis star.

North by Northwest special features:

Audio commentary by writer Ernest Lehman

North by Northwest: Cinematography, Score, and the Art of the Edit

Destination Hitchcock: The Making of North by Northwest

The Master’s Touch: Hitchcock’s Signature Style

North by Northwest: One for the Ages

A Guided Tour with Alfred Hitchcock

A New York City advertising executive goes on the run after being mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies, and falls for a woman whose loyalties he begins to doubt.

1960's Psycho is written by Joseph Stefano (The Outer Limits), based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel of the same name. Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam, John McIntire, and Janet Leigh star.

Psycho special features:

Original uncut and standard re-releases version of the film

The Making of Psycho

The Making of Psycho audio commentary with Alfred Hitchcock and The Making of Psycho author Stephen Rebello

Psycho Sound

In The Master’s Shadow: Hitchcock’s Legacy

Newsreel Footage: The Release of Psycho

The Shower Scene: With and Without Music

The Shower Sequence: Storyboards by Saul Bass

The Psycho Archives

Hitchcock/Truffaut - Audio recording from filmmaker François Truffaut’s in-depth interview with director Alfred Hitchcock about Psycho

Posters and ad gallery

Lobby card gallery

Behind-the-scenes photo gallery

Production photo gallery

Psycho theatrical trailers

Psycho re-release trailer

A secretary on the run for embezzlement takes refuge at a secluded motel owned by a repressed man and his overbearing mother.

1963's The Birds is written by Evan Hunter (High and Low), based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 short story of the same name. Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, and Veronica Cartwright star.

The Birds special features:

The Birds: Hitchcock’s Monster Movie

All About The Birds

Original ending

Deleted scene

Tippi Hedren’s screen test

The Birds is coming (Universal International Newsreel)

Suspense Story: National Press Club hears Hitchcock (Universal International Newsreel)

100 Years of Universal: Restoring the Classics

100 Years of Universal: The Lot

Hitchcock/Truffaut - Audio recording from filmmaker François Truffaut’s in-depth interview with director Alfred Hitchcock about Vertigo

Theatrical trailer

A wealthy San Francisco socialite pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people.

Pre-order Alfred Hitchcock: The Iconic Film Collection.

[take-me-to-valhalla]

how it started: I'm gonna have a go at the Arsène Lupin books, they sound fun!

how it's going: I'm gonna have to find the Boileau-Narcejac pastiches. And the Sherlock Lupin & I children series. And Lupin III

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/10-11/2023: MAD LOVE (1935), BODY PARTS (1991)

I had always heard, casually, that Eric Red's BODY PARTS was a remake of Karl Freund's MAD LOVE. The relationship can't be quite that direct, since each film is adapted from a separate novel--MAD LOVE from Maurice Renard's The Hands of Orlac (1920), and BODY PARTS from a book with the English title Choice Cuts (1968) by crime-writing duo Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. It just so happens that the two films deal with the notion that consciousness exists throughout the body, not only in the brain. This is a real idea, actually (Wayback doesn't get behind this paywall, but maybe you have something better), although I haven't heard anyone posit that personality exists throughout the body like it does in these exciting movies.

Simply one of the best appearances of a human being in a movie.

In MAD LOVE Colin Clive plays Stephen Orlac, a famous pianist who, after a devastating accident, receives a transplant of both hands from the disturbed Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre). Orlac doesn't know that he now has the hands of a murderer, and they have retained their former habits. Gogol uses the ensuing drama to try to deprive the pianist of his beautiful wife Yvonne (Frances Drake), a Grand Guignol performer with whom the doctor is obsessed. Gogol seems to know that body parts can remain identified with their original owner, and perhaps this awareness feeds into his general attachment to appearances. His projected relationship with Yvonne is filtered through layers of simulation: He "knows" her from her stage role, and he lives with a wax figure of her in a self-conscious imitation of the myth of Galatea, the living statue. Perhaps what's inside doesn't count so much, when the personality is equally embedded in the outside.

In BODY PARTS, psychiatrist Bill Crushank (Jeff Fahey, don't ya just love him?) receives a new arm after a surviving a spectacular car wreck. The experimental procedure seems like a godsend until previous owner's violent nature begins to infect Crushank's behavior. To solve the mystery of what is happening to him, he seeks out the recipients of other limbs donated by the same crazed killer, including a vigorous young athlete named Mark (Peter Murnik) who needed new legs, and Remo (Brad Dourif), a hack painter who has experienced a burst of highly lucrative inspiration since he accepted his new arm. All of the men have been contaminated with the original donor's destructive rage, but Mark and Remo are less willing to part with their, er, parts. Here we have a whiff of the notion that the beast in man--the animal self that resists civilization--is connected to bodily power and pleasure, and also to subconscious, intuitive mental activities like the artistic impulse. Crushank, a psychiatrist who works with prisoners to help civilize them, is naturally less benefited by these bestial qualities.

The makeup in this movie is incredibly great, you can practically smell that arm.

BODY PARTS and MAD LOVE share the intriguing feature of a kind of decentralized evil. There is the evil of the original owner of the parts, and the evil that grows in their unwitting recipients, and the evil of the egomaniacal doctors who perform the operations for their own purposes. Villainy is sort of a free-floating essence that travels through bodily tissue but is never confined to a single, containable, even killable person. Instead it spreads like a virus through a person's life until both their inner feelings and their outer circumstances are entirely tainted. It's fortunate for the films' protagonists that consciousness is still corporeally dependent, despite how communicable it is, or else things could have been a lot worse!

PS Both of these movies deserve a lot more attention than I was able to give them during what I did not know would turn into a speed run season of Blogtober. I reserve the right to revisit them later! I didn't even get to talk about how BODY PARTS was co-written by Norman Snider who co-wrote DEAD RINGERS with David Cronenberg...

[creepynostalgy]

Véra Clouzot and Henri-Georges Clouzot on set of Les Diaboliques (1955)

[addictivecontradiction]

Les yeux sans visage, 1960

[columbosunday]

2023 Favorites:

Books:

- Nada by Jean-Patrick Manchester

- Vertigo by Narcejac & Boileau

- Pronto by Elmore Leonard

- Mister Wonderful by Daniel Clowes

- Someone Who Isn't Me by Geoff Rickey

Albums:

- Speed, Sound, Lonely KV by Kurt Vile

- Matthew & Son by Cat Stevens

- Tell Mama by Etta James

- The Art Pepper Quartet by Art Pepper

- Count Bassie and the Kansas City 7

Movies:

- The Man from Laramie dir. Anthony Mann

- Forty Guns dir. Samuel Fuller

- Three Days of the Condor dir. Sydney Pollack

- The Children's Hour dir. William Wyler

- Brazil dir. Terry Gilliam

- Hud dir. Martin Ritt

- Written on the Wind dir. Douglas's Sirk

- Basket Case 3 dir. Frank Henenlotter

- Magic dir. Richard Attenborough

Tagged by: @dejavu2006 and @streetlegal1978

[food4dogs]

We went down the rabbit hole with French author duo Boileau-Narcejac.

Never heard of them? Mon dieu! 😱 But you've heard of Vertigo, Hitchcock's famous movie .. right?

Well, that's based on a story by Boileau-Narcejac. So we re-watched Vertigo (1958). Great stuff. And old Hitch actually stuck pretty closely to the novel's storyline. B&N's trademark was a tight meshing of psychology (obsession and delusion in particular) with hard-boiled crime fiction, with just a soupçon of horror for a truly fiendish blend.

After that we naturellement had to watch the other great adaptation of a Boileau-Narcejac novel: Les Diaboliques (1955)!

None of the English title translations ever seem to quite hit that spot (Fiends comes closest), so Diabolique or Les Diaboliques it stays.

We spent hours the next day dissecting the movie. You can watch it as a straight-up thriller - or you can absorb everything Clouzot shows us. Starting with the very early shot of an old Citroen van driving through a puddle, focus on the tire flattening a child's folded paper boat into the mud.

There are many scenes about life in the boarding school, including the dopey misfits that pass for teaching staff. You may think that this is all extra baggage - but once you've reached the ending (what an ending!), wind back and consider how tightly each little 'flavour' scene helps underpin and enrich the story's driving force.

A note about the actors. Simone Signoret (on right) is always rightly acclaimed for her role. But to me, the actor who is the heart (literally - she has a serious heart condition) of this tragic tale is Véra Clouzot, the wife of director Clouzot.

Véra Clouzot starred in 3 of her husband's movies. She died young - aged 46 - in 1960, from a heart attack.

Her portrayal as the girlish, deeply religious wife of her schoolmaster husband is nothing short of revelatory.

A side note: Charles Vanel Plays the bumbling, retired police detective who reportedly served as the inspiration for Columbo. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/diabolique-1995

Les Diaboliques is available on YouTube in a quality transfer with closed caption English subtitles.