#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...

[knightotoc]

So at this point I'm 100% convinced that Matteo JWHJ 0715 based Goncharov on the 1957 French novel La Botte Contrefaite by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (same guys who wrote the book Vertigo is based on). I can't find any interviews to back this up, but there are just too many coincidences. Protagonist gets trapped in a seedy intercontinental sting operation that snowballs into mass murder, love triangle with his wife and his partner, themes of the cyclical nature of time/violence -- even the goldfish motif is woven throughout. There's some interesting differences though:

In the book, Icepick Joe is called Pioche Julien and he's like 10 times as chaotic. High-key my favorite, I cried when Mario kills him on the steps of Notre-Dame Cathedral😭

The book actually leaves it more ambiguous whether Mario is the killer or not. There's one line of dialogue that implies Julien's murder was the first truly unforgivable crime Andrey (aka Auguste) was involved in

Mario Ambrosini is still called Mario Ambrosini

Katya (aka Olga) gets a lot more character development -- honestly that's the main reason I'd recommend reading it, I was always on her side but now I've read the book I would do anything for her

And of course, the big one: Andrey (aka Auguste) and Goncharov (aka Guillnchievé) are gay lovers in the book, though they break up after only 1 week (if you can believe it). The ending of the story is way longer, there's a whole final 20 pages where they are separated until we get to that iconic final moment. It's basically the same as the movie's, but their post-breakup tension adds a whole other level😭💔

[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. 

[creepynostalgy]

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

[addictivecontradiction]

Les yeux sans visage, 1960

[columbosunday]

Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac

[littlemovieposters]

2023 Home Viewing #26: Diabolique. (dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

This has been in my to-watch stack for a good while; it got fast-tracked when I learned it, like Hitchcock’s Vertigo, was based on a novel by the French duo Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. I recently rewatched Vertigo, after which I read its Boileau/Narcejac origin novel. Vertigo is an undisputable classic, largely for its groundbreaking visuals, but like some ’50s critics I have some issues with it; there is a plot aspect that doesn’t add up very well, though with time these have been forgiven and few people dare criticize the film. The novel helped me reconcile my issues with the plot; Boileau and Narcejac present things more clearly than Hitchcock is able to in the rush of the film’s final third. I should also mention that the novel’s ending is much different than the ending concocted by screenwriters Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor. (I will add that Jimmy Stewart’s character feels better developed to me in the film than the novel. The sympathetic character Midge, played by Barbara Bel Geddes, is a creation of the screenwriters, by the way; she has no parallel in the novel.)

I have not read the Boileau/Narcejac novel on which Diabolique was based, though I’d like to. Despite all of the appeal of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, I find Diabolique the superior film. It’s an excellent thriller and I did not see its apex coming. 

[saintofdaggers]

A strange and unsettling reading rec list

Kobo Abe: The Box Man, The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another

Kobo Abe was a prolific Japanese postmodernist author whose work deals heavily with questions of identity, existence and meaning in odd and surreal settings. The Box Man starts out as a tale of urban alienation before plunging headfirst into a confusing labyrinth of questions unanswered; The Woman in the Dunes sees an everyday figure trapped in a nightmarish living situation with a mysterious companion, while The Face of Another is a twisted meditation of identity and appearance (the latter two have also been adapted into excellent movies by New Wave director Hiroshi Teshigahara).

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

This lyrical, haunting journey takes us into the world of cities. Imaginary cities, existing cities, fantastical, dreamed and made up, will-be or has-been cities. Do you understand it? Do you feel it? It works both ways.

Adolfo Bioy Casares: The Invention of Morel

While not perfect, this unsettling pseudo-sci-fi novella from a contemporary of uncanny master Jorge Luis Borges has one of the most twisted, surprising and grotesque endings I’ve read, embedded in an atmosphere of guilt, paranoia and unrequited longing.

Leonid Andreyev: The Red Laugh

If you are looking for the most visceral, haunting, surreal yet utterly believable depiction of the horrors of war, look no further than this short story from an underappreciated early Russian realist.

Daisy Johnson: Sisters

A tense, dreamlike, vinegar-sharp twist on the classic Gothic premise of ‘strange women in strange houses’, this short little novel was one of the most surprising and satisfying reads of the year for me.

Victor Pelevin: The Yellow Arrow

Without spoiling the premise, this little travel story is both heavily existential and elegantly symbolic, while steeped in the categoric Eastern European down-to-earth reality, and just enough mystery to make you think. Studying it in college was a formative experience for me.

Friedrich Durrenmatt: A Dangerous Game (US title: Traps)

Not to be confused with the similarly-titled classic short story, this novella is from a brilliant Swiss writer who has been my favorite ever since my middle school German teacher put him on my radar. A master of the odd, the tragic and of the blackest comedy, most of Durrenmatt’s catalog makes for very rewarding reading; but this novella, about the nature of guilt and the absurdities of the justice system was another memorable piece of college study in my life.

Han Kang: The Vegetarian

If you haven’t read yet this (deservedly popular) haunting, powerful story of a woman’s quest for autonomy and identity, do it. Reading it feels like being doused with a shower of ice-cold water and blood - and I mean that as the highest compliment.

Kathe Koja: Extremities

Ex-horror author Kathe Koja first got on the literary radar with her Stoker Award-winning debut novel The Cipher; however, this collection of surreal, grotesque and disturbing short stories is much lesser-known than I feel it deserves. To sum it up: Extremities is a trip to that thin little border where the impossible and the nightmarish breaks through to invade everyday life. Whether the protagonists can deal with it or not... read it and find out.

Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac: The Woman Who Was No More, Faces in the Dark

Boileau-Narcejac were a prolific French crime-writing duo who have sadly fallen to the wayside in recent years, except for fans of classic crime thrillers and European crime fiction (you might know them as the people who wrote the novel Vertigo is based on - yes, the Hitchcock movie). These two novels, from the few of theirs that have been translated into English, are incisive and creepy psychological trips into the psyches of disturbed individuals: a murderer and a blind man who suspects his family members of a strange conspiracy, respectively. Both are twisted, surprising and written with potent imagery that I guarantee will stay with you.

[laforzadelvoila]

Barbara Pravi will make her acting debut!

New challenge for Barbara Pravi! The singer, who finished second at Eurovision 2021, joins Isabelle Adjani in a new project, under the direction of Josée Dayan.

Entitled Adieu Vinyle, this new TV movie for France 2 produced by Dominique Besnehard and Antoine Le Carpentier is adapted from the novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac À cœur perdu.

The story is about Ève Faugère (Isabelle Adjani), a singer at the height of her career and her popularity in the late 1950s, torn between the two men in her life: Maurice, her husband and mentor, played by Mathieu Amalric and Jean, her lover and pianist, played by Matthieu Dessertine. A trio consumed by passion and carried away by the evil winds of jealousy.

Barbara Pravi will therefore take her first steps as an actress in this movie filmed between Paris and Normandy. She plays Florence, a young and lovely singer, both an unconditional admirer of Ève and ready to do anything to take her place.

This movie with a five-star cast will also bring together Grégory Fitoussi, Jacques Bonnafe, Jérôme Deschamps, Julie Dumas and François Burreloup.

Between toxic loves and latent threats from an ambitious Dauphine, the life of Ève Faugère will slide inexorably into tragedy. Filming will begin on December 26 and end on January 25, 2023.

• Source: Télé-Loisirs | Translation from Google •