#thomas narcejac

[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

[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."

[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...

[haverwood]

Body Parts Eric Red USA, 1991 ★★★ I started watching knowing Jeff Fahey was in it and went like "hey remember that movie where he loses an arm, gets a transplant from a criminal and starts acting all whacky and deranged?"

Well this was it! Amazing. Huge throwback to the good old (and fun) VHS days.

So anyway, I could've bet money on this being a King adaptation but no, it's based on the "horror novel Choice Cuts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac" (copy/paste from wiki). It's great, fun and gory, with lots of familiar faces in it.

This kind of genre needs a big comeback.

[byneddiedingo]

Lindsay Duncan, Jeff Fahey, and Kim Delaney in Body Parts (Eric Red, 1991)

Cast: Jeff Fahey, Lindsay Duncan, Kim Delaney, Zakes Mokae, Brad Dourif, John Walsh, Paul Ben-Victor, Peter Murnik. Screenplay: Patricia Herskovic, Joyce Taylor, Eric Red, Norman Snider, based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Cinematography: Theo van de Sande. Production design: Bill Brodie. Editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Loek Dikker. 

How can a movie with a car chase, a fight in a barroom, and an abundance of gore turn out so dull? Body Parts is based on an old trope, that of severed members taking on a life of their own. Adaptations of W.W. Jacobs's 1902 story "The Monkey's Paw" are so numerous they have a Wikipedia page of their own and Maurice Renard's 1920 novel Les Mains d'Orlac, about a concert pianist who receives the transplanted hands of a murderer, has been filmed several times, including Robert Wiene's 1924 silent The Hands of Orlac and Karl Freund's 1935 Mad Love, starring Peter Lorre. The many adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein also play on the notion of reanimated body parts. But it's not that the idea behind Eric Red's movie has been done to death, so to speak, it's that Red and the various screenwriters who worked on the movie find so little new and interesting to do with it. It's adapted from a 1965 novel, Choice Cuts, by the writing team known as Boileau-Narcejac, who provided the source material for some much better movies: Diabolique (aka Les Diaboliques, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). The acting isn't bad. As Bill Chrushank, a psychiatrist who receives the arm of a murderer after losing his own in an auto accident, Jeff Fahey does a solid job of suggesting the ways the transplant brings out the worst in what may have been his own latent tendencies to violence. Lindsay Duncan plays the surgeon who does the transplant as a cold-blooded scientist with just a touch of hauteur that turns malevolent when her breakthrough technique is threatened. Brad Dourif overacts a little as the artist who receives the other arm and finds that it actually feeds his imagination and produces darkly disturbing paintings that sell. And Kim Delaney does what she can with the role of Chrushank's wife, who bears the brunt of his emotional transformation. But Red's direction never builds suspense, giving us time to anticipate the shocks we expect the material to provide. There's also a completely unearned "happy ending" that saps any lingering tension from what has gone before. 

[columbosunday]

Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac

[creepynostalgy]

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

[addictivecontradiction]

Les yeux sans visage, 1960

[agendaculturaldelima]

  #ProyeccionDeVida

📽 Cine Club AF. Noches de Terror, presenta:

🎬 “LOS OJOS SIN ROSTRO” (Les Yeux sans visage)

🔎 Género: Terror  / Thriller / Película de culto.

⌛️ Duración: 88 minutos

✍️ Guion: Claude Sautet, Pierre Boileau y Thomas Narcejac

📕 Novela: Jean Redon

📷 Fotografía: Eugen Schüfftan (B&W)

🎼 Música: Maurice Jarre

💥 Argumento: En la ciudad de París, un brillante y desquiciado cirujano rapta chicas con el fin de utilizar su piel para reconstruir la belleza de su hija, destrozada por un trágico accidente del que él se siente culpable.

👥 Reparto: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Edith Scob, François Guérin, Alexandre Rignault, Béatrice Altariba, Claude Brasseur

📢 Dirección: Georges Franju

© Productoras: Independent Pictures, The Guys Upstairs, Killer Films

🌏 País: Francia-Italia

📅 Año 1960

📽 Proyección:

📆 Miércoles 30 de Octubre

🕖 7:00pm.

🎦 Sala Lumiere de la Alianza Francesa (av. Arequipa 4595 - Miraflores)

🎫 Entrada: S/.5

👩‍🦳👴 Adulto Mayor: Ingreso Libre

🖱 Reservas: https://www.joinnus.com/events/cine/lima-nuits-de-terreur-crimenes-del-futuro-65076

👀 A tener en cuenta: Película recomendada para mayores de dieciséis años (16+)

[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…

[kinonostalgie]

Diabolique (1955)

Die Teuflischen

Starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse and Charles Vanel, Diabolique (or Les Diaboliques) is based on the 1952 novel She Who Was No More written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. It centers around Michel Delassalle, the brutal headmaster of a run-down boarding school, which is owned by his wife and teacher Christina.

Michel also has an affair with another teacher, Nicole. Christina and Nicole’s mutual hatred for Michel leads them to poison him and dump his body in a pool. But when Michel’s body disappears from the pool, they wonder if he’s really dead.

Introduced Whodunit Before the Genre Was Invented

Director Henri-Georges Clouzot uses an eroding sense of fear and guilt to provoke a haunting tone in his movie, the events of which play out like an innovative whodunit. The warped angles with which the story is told amplifies unease. Diabolique is not visceral or gory, but it is still very unsettling to watch. Signoret and Clouzot elicit a complex and cerebral performance. It aligns perfectly with the scattered bits of terror. Diabolique can rival any modern Hollywood horror, and for that reason, it is still worth revisiting.

[culturevsnews-blog]

Diabolique [Combo Blu-Ray + DVD] Sharon Stone (Acteur), Isabelle Adjani (Acteur), Jeremiah S. Chechik (Réalisateur)

Achat : https://amzn.to/3Sf5hW5 Adaptation du film d’Henri-Georges Clouzot qui a lui-même adapté le roman de Pierre Boileau et Thomas Narcejac, “Celle qui n’était plus”. “Diabolique” raconte à travers la manipulation, le mensonge et le meurtre, les relations entre deux femmes. Chronique : “Diabolique” est un thriller psychologique captivant et une adaptation du classique de Henri-Georges…