Claude Chabrol was one of the five leading auteurs of the nouvelle vague, or French New Wave, alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut. Although they started out as cinephile friends, then fellow critics, then creative collaborators working in various capacities on each other’s first films, it soon became apparent that their styles and preoccupations were quite different. After Chabrol rapidly established himself with a quartet of gems – his 1958 debut Le Beau Serge (regarded by some as the first feature of the New Wave), Les Cousins and À Double Tour (both 1959), and Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) – he came to be recognised as a filmmaker with a distinctive take on crime and Catholic notions of guilt, sin, responsibility and redemption. Indeed, by the late 1960s, he was often referred to as “the French Alfred Hitchcock”: unsurprisingly, perhaps, given his co-authorship, with Rohmer, of a pioneering 1957 study of the English director.
While it’s true that Le Beau Serge was loosely inspired by Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and that many of Chabrol’s films feature murder – and, occasionally, moments paying homage to the master, as in the killer’s detailed disposal of a corpse in 1969’s The Unfaithful Wife, a clear nod to Psycho – the “French Hitch” tag is inadequate, even misleading. Yes, Chabrol’s editing style was considerably closer to Hollywood conventions than that of Godard or Rivette, but his films were much more measured in their rhythms than all but the slowest, later Hitchcock films. More importantly, the most revealing difference between the directors lies in the importance attached to “suspense”. Hitchcock, fascinated by notions of “pure cinema”, was primarily interested in creating films that would have an almost Pavlovian emotional effect on the audience. But one seldom feels that suspense or the sly manipulation of a viewer’s sympathies mattered as much to Chabrol. In exploring the possible causes and/or consequences of murder, the Frenchman prioritised character and thematic content, be it psychological, philosophical, ethical or sociological, over narrative method.
A further difference: where Hitchcock’s films frequently focus on the role of chance in the irruption of dangerous chaos in the quotidian, Chabrol’s often seem suffused with a sense of inevitability, of fate playing out. It is as if he is dissecting a character, couple or family, society or situation from a detached, quasi-scientific point of view, analysing how things are and what will therefore happen. A French Fritz Lang?
Born in 1930, Chabrol grew up in Sardent, a rural community in central France – to which he would return to shoot Le Beau Serge – before moving to postwar Paris to study pharmacology and literature at the Sorbonne. What had been a childhood passion for films blossomed into outright cinephilia, with regular visits to the Cinémathèque Française and other Parisian cinemas where he met the friends who would also write reviews for Arts and Cahiers du Cinéma before turning to making films themselves. Though Chabrol’s first feature didn’t involve crime per se – it concerns a medical graduate’s attempts to save an old friend from alcoholic self-destruction, culminating in his own death – it displaced an interest in what would be an enduring theme: the transference of guilt between individuals. (Chabrol described his debut as “a farewell to Catholicism”.) Les Cousins – the first of 14 collaborations with the scriptwriter Paul Gégauff – was virtually a reversal of its predecessor, with its two likewise polarised lead characters clashing in the city; this time, it ended in accidental homicide. Then followed À Double Tour and Les Bonnes Femmes, both involving deliberate murders. Chabrol’s destiny was manifest.
Nevertheless, disappointing box-office returns for the latter two films found him embarking on a run of mostly lighter, more conventionally entertaining thrillers, few of which won praise. In 1968, however, working with the producer André Génovès, he made the first of a remarkable string of films that found both critical and commercial favour, beginning with Les Biches and including The Unfaithful Wife, The Beast Must Die, Le Boucher, The Break, Just Before Nightfall, Ten Days Wonder and Wedding in Blood. Over five years he created a distinctive Chabrolian universe populated by impressive actors such as Stéphane Audran (Chabrol’s second wife), Jean Yanne and the Michels Bouquet, Piccoli and Duchaussoy, with Jean Rabier providing fluid cinematography, Pierre Jansen expressive musical scores and Jacques Gaillard eloquent editing.
The films played wonderfully imaginative and illuminating variations on a range of interlinked themes: relationships – familial, sexual, social – are constantly undermined by struggles for and shifts in power; bourgeois notions of respectability fall foul of primal impulses and destructive urges; deception is ubiquitous; the resort to violence and vengeance all too ready. In film after film, Chabrol depicts human follies and foibles with a cool detachment that never precludes compassion. In The Unfaithful Wife,we see clearly the sins of an adulterous wife and her eventually murderous husband, yet their deep love for one another is also made apparent. In Le Boucher, a village teacher at last responds with powerful emotions towards a war veteran wooing her, but only after she learns he’s a psychopathic killer. Paradoxes, ambiguities, ironies abound. Characters’ perspectives on one another change as easily as our own: in The Beast Must Die, a man seeking deadly vengeance against a hit-and-run driver responsible for his son’s demise repeatedly finds his presumptions and finally his sense of purpose undermined. Chabrol constantly nags at an unspoken question: who is really responsible for this misdeed? “Facts,” like people, are rarely as they first appear.
For all the darkness of his material – which was, however, often leavened by a gently mocking wit, usually at the expense of bourgeois manners – Chabrol’s sheer expertise ensured that his greatest films succeeded both as exhilarating examples of cinematic artistry and as highly personal but very evocative depictions of developments in French life.
If the work made after Wedding in Blood was uneven, in terms of quality he still furnished more hits than misses. A long-standing creative partnership with Isabelle Huppert (seven films made between 1978 and 2006) was especially fruitful; he was always skilled at casting and directing actors, just as he was adept at making vividly atmospheric use of locations the length and breadth of France. And while he repeatedly adapted crime writers like Georges Simenon, Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell, Ed McBain and Ellery Queen, he didn’t entirely restrict himself in terms of genre, drawing on Simone de Beauvoir (The Blood of Others), Henry Miller (Quiet Days in Clichy) and Flaubert (Madame Bovary), among others.
The politique des auteurs, or auteur theory, advanced by Chabrol’s colleagues at Cahiers du Cinéma argued that it was the director, above all, who was responsible for a film’s status as a meaningful artwork, due to a distinctive cinematic style and worldview. Like Rohmer, Godard, Truffaut and Rivette, Chabrol undoubtedly embodied such an idea, remaining true to his creative self from the start to the close of his long, prolific career, which ended with his death, aged 80, in 2010. Indeed, his swansong, Bellamy (2009) – a tribute to Simenon, about an ageing detective unable to put aside his fascination with criminality and what makes people tick – was at once a psychologically astute character study and, perhaps, a touching, veiled allusion to its creator.
The film season Claude Chabrol: Elements of Crime is at London’s BFI from 1 September to 6 October
[Further reading: Tony cannot make Bourdain cool]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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