Over the years, I have seen Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO (1960) countless times, and it has proven its value to me time and time again by always giving me something new to appreciate and to work with. It is hard for me to imagine a more generous film in terms of its seemingly inexhaustible supply of stylistic facets and practical ideas. It is also true that sometimes a good film can teach us something worth knowing about another director's work; for example, it's unlikely that critics would have ever contrasted the works of Terence Fisher, for example, with those of Frank Borzage had Fisher not singled out this other director for his highest praise in a CINEFANTASTIQUE interview conducted by Harry Ringel back in 1973. And so it was to my own great surprise that I recently discovered such a connection - one that struck me as so obvious, I started acting like Paul McCartney when he had dreamed the song "Yesterday" and went around playing it for all his friends, unable to believe that no one had ever written it before.
As my interest in further exploring Claude Chabrol's work has continued, I recently had the opportunity to screen his first feature LE BEAU SERGE (1958), which is available from Criterion in a splendid Blu-ray edition. I was under the mistaken impression that I had seen it once before, as I had seen his second film LES COUSINS (1959) when Criterion first released the two films in tandem back in 2011; I loved LES COUSINS and had every intention of watching the earlier film but something apparently diverted my attention from it. My copy was still in its original shrink-wrap! Anyway, I was most impressed by LE BEAU SERGE, which is the story of a successful young author (Jean-Pierre Brialy) who returns to his hometown, a restful little village, to recover from tuberculosis. There, he discovers a fondly remembered old friend, Serge (Gérard Blain), who has become an alcoholic, trapped in an unhappy marriage with a young wife expecting a child - the second after the first was lost in childbirth and found to have had Down's Syndrome. Hating his life and circumstances, as well as the wife he knows he loves, and dreading that his new child will also be tainted with what was then called "mongolism," the film builds to the child's healthy birth and the final image of its lead character laughing with joy. As he continues laughing, cameraman Henri Decaë diffuses focus until the handsome Serge's face becomes a blurred mess from which the likeness of a skull emerges. Sitting alone in my living room at 3:00am, I couldn't hold back a "Whoa!" at this bold revelation.
Though the two films tell very different stories, both LE BEAU SERGE and PSYCHO end with the same basic image and frisson:
Not only was the connection immediately obvious to me, but so was the most likely reason Hitchcock would have knowingly quoted it. In 1957, before either man became a director in his own right, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer had collaborated on the first book ever written about Alfred Hitchcock and his films, a critical overview of his first forty-four films entitled simply ALFRED HITCHCOCK in French and ALFRED HITCHCOCK: THE FIRST FORTY-FOUR FILMS in English translation.
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| Peter Bogdanovich's signed copy, which recently sold to a lucky collector for $2,500. |
Chabrol was the first of the French Nouvelle Vague directors to make his own film, his first wife having inherited a good deal of money that the couple put toward the production of LE BEAU SERGE, saving him the trouble of having to find a sympathetic producer as his fellows had to do. NORTH BY NORTHWEST, Hitchcock's film of 1958, would have been made before Hitchcock read the book, which means that PSYCHO would have been the first Hitchcock film to have been made by a newly critically-explained, self-conscious Hitchcock. It makes sense that he would have expressed his gratitude for their close reading of his work by showing equal attention to theirs - by acknowledging this moment from Chabrol's maiden effort in his own with a characteristic wink.
Of course, it is also possible that Hitchcock was concerned about whether or not this quotation might be too direct, as different prints of PSYCHO have turned up over the years without its chilling subliminal double exposure at the end. Just as it is also possible that the idea may have occurred to him without being fully aware of what had inspired it. Indeed, I'm assuming in saying all of this that the nearly subliminal PSYCHO double exposure was not originated in Joseph Stefano's screenplay adaptation of Robert Bloch's novel because stylistic touches such as this are traditionally the province of the director.
As LE BEAU SERGE reaches its conclusion, its title character finally becomes a father, a role he has tried to forget as someone like the living dead throughout the bulk of the film the duration of the film. The meaning of its closing shot is probably arguable, but I believe it shows the dawning of real parental terror at the moment of a child's birth, that first intimation of one's own life as being no more than a small and tentative link in a very long chain. Serge is no longer self-absorbed; he has become "all father," much as Norman Bates in his cell has become "all Mother."
Anyway, I checked Claude Chabrol authority Guy Austin's LE BEAU SERGE audio commentary for further information; he acknowledged that the blurring of Serge briefly resembles a skull, but draws no comparison to the film that replayed this idea for greater chills in its closing moments. I also asked some Facebook friends (including fellow critic Adrian Martin) if they knew of anyone who had explored this connection before, and to the best of their pooled knowledge, it seemed to be a fresh observation.
And so, to mark the moment and my eureka, I am sharing it now with you.
(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
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