For the latest round of online store additions, the following titles were selected: Brian De Palma’s “Obsession” and the anthology film “Spirits of the Dead” (both from the UK’s Arrow Video) and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “The Murderer Lives at 21,” released by Eureka’s Masters of Cinema line.
Prior to his directorial debut in 1942, Henri-Georges Clouzot spent over a decade working as a screenwriter. From 1941-43, while running the script department for Continental-Films (the German production company UFA’s subsidiary in occupied France), Clouzot penned a pair of screenplays. One was “The Last of the Six,” a comedic mystery based on a novel by Stanislas-André Steeman whose screen adaptation starred Pierre Fresnay and Suzy Delair; the other was “The Strangers in the House,” which, upon seeing the film and feeling that director Henri Decoin “added nothing to it,” Clouzot decided to start directing. At this point he took the reins of another comedic mystery Steeman adaptation starring Fresnay and Declair, “The Murderer Lives at 21.” “The film was a triumph,” Delair would later say. “[T]he cinemas, like the theatres or music-halls, were packed.”
However, there would be trouble on the horizon for Clouzot. His next film, “Le Corbeau,” was derided as anti-French propaganda and banned after France’s liberation; he himself was branded a Nazi collaborator and prohibited from making movies until 1947. Upon being reinstated Clouzot got his career back on track with “Quai des Orfèvres,” and during the 1950s he would go on to make “The Wages of Fear” and “Diabolique,” two of the most highly-regarded French films of all-time.