Dark Undercurrents: Claude Chabrol’s Second Wave from Les Biches (1968) to Innocents with Dirty Hands (1975)

“There are no waves, there is only the ocean.” – Claude Chabrol

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From 1968 to 1975 Claude Chabrol directed a dozen films – one of the most fertile and accomplished periods of his career. The streak was all the more remarkable in that it seemed to come out of nowhere. Just one year previously, Andrew Sarris had described Chabrol, and with good reason, as “one of the forgotten figures of the Nouvelle Vague.”

It had been a long fall from grace for one of the leading lights of the French New Wave. Of his friends from the Cahiers du Cinema crowd – Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard – Chabrol had been the first to release a feature film (Le Beau Serge), and with his early successes he helped support the initial efforts of the others. Celebrated Chabrol films followed in rapid succession – eight of them from 1958 to 1963, an impressive run that can now be seen as Chabrol’s first wave. In those heady days, the dark horse assessment of Henri Langlois, co-founder of the legendary Cinémathèque Française – that of those Young Turks, it was Chabrol who had the greatest potential of them all looked smart.

By the mid-sixties, however, few would have placed a similar bet. By then the New Wave more generally had fallen on hard times, having lost much of its cache – and even more of its commercial good fortune. Rivette went five years between releases; Rohmer, unable to finance his feature films, retreated to documentary TV for a similarly long stretch; even Truffaut slowed down considerably. Chabrol took a different approach. Faced with reduced prospects by 1963 (and it should be acknowledged that his second quartet of films, still worthy of serious attention, were not as compelling as his initial four), he made himself available as a director-for-hire. Back then (as it ought to be now), that was something of a sin, and a slew of forgettable, commercially-oriented films followed. With the exception of his very fine occupation-drama The Line of Demarcation, with Maurice Ronet, Jean Seberg, and Stéphane Audran (Chabrol’s wife from 1964 to 1980), in general these were undistinguished efforts (Anthony Perkins joked that he only agreed to appear in The Champagne Murders, alongside Ronet and Audran, so that he would at least have a chance at understanding its convoluted plot).

And yet Chabrol would re-emerge from the ashes of that mediocrity. In retrospect, two factors appear to account for his phoenix-like middle-aged resurrection. First, Chabrol, pushing forty, had matured considerably as a filmmaker; all of his second-wave efforts are characterized by a confident sure-handedness at the helm, and are recognizably distinguished by his curious, autonomous camera, whose graceful, subtle movements invariably reveal more about the story than the nominal dialogue. Chabrol also emerged in the late 1960s as his own man, reaching beyond the foundations of his principal, formative influences, Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. With Rohmer, in 1957 Chabrol had written the first serious book about Hitchcock, and the bravura, climatic murder in Le Bonnes Femmes (1960) is a transcendent illustration of that imprint. Lang’s influence, and his implicit fatalism, is less immediately obvious but not to be underestimated; as James Monaco observed, many of Hitchcock’s protagonists are innocent, “but everyone is always guilty in Chabrol’s films,” which feature “a darker, more Langian guilt.” Chabrol never abandoned these masters, but by his second decade of filmmaking such inspirations would inform rather than obscure his increasingly distinct voice.

The second crucial factor in setting loose this second wave, which was heralded by the release of the critical and commercial sensation Les Biches on March 22 1968, was the arrival on the scene of André Génovès, who produced all twelve of these films. Chabrol is generous and explicit in his acknowledgment of how important it is to have a good producer in general – and the crucial role of Génovès in particular – who can provide both support for and protection of a filmmaker’s vision. Chabrol also worked on these films with a consistent team of familiar behind-the-camera talent, some of whom he would collaborate with for decades: cinematographer Jean Rabier, editor Jacques Gaillard, production designer Guy Littaye, and composer Pierre Jansen. In addition, Chabrol also recovered his gift for putting pen to paper, writing or co-writing the lion’s share of these screenplays; another important participant was the notorious Paul Gégauff, who had a hand in five of these scripts. Gégauff, a novelist, sybarite, and all-around provocateur who reveled in shocking displays of outrageous behavior, was a friend and affiliate of the New Wave crowd, contributing to many of Chabrol’s renowned earlier films as well as Rohmer’s debut feature Le Signe du Lion; Godard gave him a small part in Weekend. “What attracted us to him,” Rohmer would later explain, was that the brash, transgressive writer had “a certain insolence.” Chabrol put it more bluntly: “When I want cruelty,” he told one interviewer in 1971, “I go off and look for Gégauff.”

On screen, Chabrol’s second-wave films are populated by a loose stock company of players, most crucially Audran, who has a lead role in half of them; Michel Duchaussoy appears in five, other favorites reappear frequently. The stories also share common thematic concerns, regarding jealousy, marital fidelity, interpersonal power dynamics, and shifting loyalties across triangular relationships – often there is a Charles and a Hélène (Audran played four different Hélènes), whose relationship is disrupted by a complicating Paul. Bourgeoisie rituals come under anthropological interrogation; domestic geography is surgically precise (dwellings, simple and palatial, are meticulously designed); and there is Chabrol’s signature delight in lingering over meals, especially at crucial junctures. Almost invariably, there is murder, always, there is guilt, the weight of which is shared by more than one character.

LES BICHES (1968). “With the films since ‘Les Biches,’ I think I’m finally on the right track,” Chabrol told Roger Ebert in late 1970. “I knew I was interested in murder, but what I didn’t realize is that my interest isn’t in solving puzzles. I want to study the human behavior of people involved in murder.” It was this epiphany that would provide the touchstone for the rest of his prodigious career, which would extend though forty more active years, and explains why Chabrol’s oeuvre transcends the genre that he chose as the backdrop for so many of his films. “I believe I’ve succeeded now in making the audience’s natural interest in murder secondary to its interest in the characters and the situation,” he explained. “If I reveal the identity of the murderer right away, the audience isn’t distracted by who-done-it, and I’m in control.” In Les Biches the murder actually comes quite late, and is almost an afterthought in a film that is largely about possession and jealousy. Written with Gégauff, the nominal plot could not be more minimalist: well-to-do Frédérique (Audran) picks up street artist Why (Jacqueline Sassard) and takes her for a companion, and a lover. Wintering in Frédérique’s villa in Saint Tropez, Why catches the eye of local architect Paul (Jean-Louis Trintignant), but this budding romance is quashed by Frédérique, who shifts her sexual loyalties (and sartorial presentation) and seduces Paul. What follows might appear as an uneasy and implicitly titillating ménage-a-trois, but in fact Les Biches is much more about power, identity, and control than it is about sex – and the struggle for domination that ensues becomes asphyxiating. Initially it is a five-sided competition: Frédérique’s old friends, permanent freeloading houseguests Robègue and Riais (Henri Attal and Dominique Zardi, who would pop up in a myriad of minor roles in countless Chabrol films), initially provide comic relief but are eventually ensnared by the competing animosities and ultimately dispatched, leaving only three. But three is an even less stable number than five, and Les Biches narrows to the question of who will be displaced, and how, with little concern for the question of Why.

LA FEMME INFIDELE (1969). The film that set the template for second-wave Chabrol, The Unfaithful Wife, finds Audran as the wayward Hélène who strays from her husband Charles – played by Michel Bouquet, another vital member of the Chabrolian circle. Chabrol dedicated Les Biches to Bouquet, and wrote this part specifically with the actor in mind. Femme Infidele displays Chabrol’s interest not simply in guilt, but in the more dramatically complex concept of shared guilt. (And it is telling that the screenplay is not an adaptation, but rather the director’s conception.) Thus although Hélène does cheat on Charles, the film nevertheless invites the audience to sympathize with her choices. In an early, understated bedroom scene, Hélène is alluring and available; Charles is passive and indifferent. Surely he bears some responsibility for her affair, which, once he begins to suspect, perhaps to his surprise affects him deeply. Unnerved, he hires a private investigator (their two scenes together are masterpieces of understatement), tracks down the lover (Maurice Ronet), and pays him a visit. What are Charles’ intentions? We don’t know. It is unlikely that he knows, but for whatever reason he must see this man with his own eyes. In the film’s pivotal sequence, the men talk, calmly, as Charles had opened with the bluff that he and Hélène have an open marriage, taking the edge (if not the oddity) off the exchange. But Charles begins to melt, and, triggered by what would seem to be a minor transgression (a small regifted item), impulsively strikes Victor, killing him. Chabrol then goes into full Hitchcock mode, with bloodstained hands, a ritual cleaning, and the disposal of a body that just might not properly sink as planned – all transposed from Psycho in a finely executed homage. With this murder La Femme Infidele pivots: if the first half is about how Charles shares in the guilt for Hélène’s affair, the story now concerns, more ambitiously, how Hélène comes to share in the responsibility for Charles’ crime. This develops slowly and at first implicitly, but when Hélène destroys a photograph that would incriminate Charles, technically she becomes an accessory after the fact in the murder of her lover. The police come and go, but they are beside the point. Chabrol is interested in Charles and Hélène, not closing the case, and his climatic Vertigo shot, dollying back while zooming in, as has been widely observed, suggests that the murderous episode will leave the couple physically more distant but emotionally much closer.

THE BEAST MUST DIE (1969). A child is killed in a hit-and-run accident (tastefully done in an agonizingly suspenseful pre-credit sequence), and his widower father vows to track down the killer and exact revenge (the police file the case as unsolvable). Through much effort and a bit of Langian luck, Charles (Michel Duchaussoy) pretends to fall for Hélène (Caroline Cellier), who can bring him closer to his target Paul (Jean Yanne), a man who is, well, perfectly beastly in every way. A relatively obscure Chabrol, it is one of his great achievements – there is not a wasted moment or false note in this film. Written with Gégauff, who was surely responsible for the beast (and that character’s equally sadistic mother), the layered, duplicitous relationships in The Beast Must Die operate at multiple levels and raise more questions than they answer. (Was the diary written to be found? Does Charles develop real feelings for Hélène? Who is the murderer, anyway?) This one has it all, with several scenes that linger in the mind, such as an early return to the homestead, with the grieving maid; many well-executed long takes; and a riveting confrontation between two men sharing a small sailboat tossed about on stormy seas. One of them can’t swim – but he has the gun. The music, always important in a Chabrol film, is central in this one; the Brittany coast locations exquisite; and the knowing camera nudges attention to key details. And of course there are the meals; on one such occasion the theatrical carving of a magnificent roast duck coincides with the revelations of a broken heart, and a murdered man. Just when you think it can’t get any better, then-struggling director Maurice Pialat (something of a beast himself, in real life) shows up near the end with a very fine, understated performance as a smart, humanist detective, who puts all the pieces together – probably.

LE BOUCHER (1970). The esteemed newspaper Le Figaro declared this the best French film since the liberation. That seems like hyperbole, but the best moments of Le Boucher are magnificent. A film of finely orchestrated movements – the story unfolds in eight or nine extended sequences – it opens with a twelve-minute wedding scene, and closes with a desperate, likely hopeless race against time. At that initial wedding, the focus of attention is not the bride and groom but two B-list guests, single schoolteacher Hélène (Audran), who has been seated, likely with friendly intention, next to Paul, the local butcher, recently returned from a long stretch in the military. (Jean Yanne, here a much more sympathetic monster than he was in The Beast Must Die.) The improbable couple walk back to town, and as they part, Chabrol’s camera choses to stay with Hélène, signaling that despite the film’s title, the film is more about her than him. In any event, as the saying goes, “and then the murders began.” Le Boucher has its master-of-suspense moments – poetic drops of blood (“is it raining?”) and an anxiety-fueled rush through a dark house to double-check that all the doors have been safely locked. But despite these flourishes, once again, this is a film more curious about the nature of guilt than it is about providing thrills. The audience, if not the authorities, is rather quickly confident that Paul is the murderer (even though the killings take place entirely off-screen), because the narrative withholds other plausible suspects. More important, and entirely the point, Hélène reaches this conclusion as well, and her choices that follow this revelation are Le Boucher’s central concern. As Chabrol explained, “I could have written the story so that his identity was concealed until the end. But that would have indicated that his guilt was the most interesting thing about him, and that’s not so. Actually, his guilt is the most interesting thing about her.”

LA RUPTURE (1970). Another Hélène in big trouble – here, after a shocking act of violence, the working-class Audran must finally divorce her abusive, disturbed, drug-addled husband Charles Régnier. But her wealthy father-in-law (Michel Bouquet), who never approved of the marriage, seeks to ensure that Charles will gain custody of the couple’s small child. Perhaps Chabrol’s most overt treatment of class politics, La Rupture nevertheless never stops to lecture; everything the movie has to say on the topic is expressed in the parallel scenes where the antagonists meet with their respective lawyers. The attorney for the wealthy Régnier, summoned to his benefactor’s palatial home, has the delicate, diplomatic task of explaining to a man accustomed to getting what he wants that he faces an uphill legal battle. Hélène consults with her advocate on a public train; reviewing her employment history, she recounts the prospects available to a woman of her station – waitress, stripper, secretary – as Chabrol (seated a few rows ahead in a cameo appearance) fixes his camera on the train tracks ahead, as if to emphasize those narrow, path-dependent prospects. Dave Kehr praised La Rupture as “one of the key films of the 70s,” and the director’s “most audacious experiment with narrative form,” but the movie is somewhat inhibited by a very un-Chabrolian characteristic – its moral clarity. Régnier, oozing with evil and unwilling to lose, hires Paul (Jean-Pierre Cassel) to do whatever it takes to destroy Hélène’s credibility. Paul is capable and crafty (and Cassel irresistibly charismatic), but he embraces the job with an amoral zeal that finds him taking measures that would give most movie villains at least a moment of pause. As a result, although many scenes are top-shelf and suspense sequences effortlessly provided (a red-herring trip to the airport stands out), La Rupture, often wildly creative, is limited by the black-and-white nature of its exposition, and toward the end plays like an inverted caper picture in which you are rooting against the gang.

JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL (1971). One of the great films of the 1970s, this is Chabrol’s most representative film, and arguably his masterpiece. The first moments of the movie, with the camera intruding upon a blinds-drawn window, again invites comparisons with Hitchcock, and the opening shot of Psycho. But that tip of the hat only serves to underscore the extent to which Chabrol has moved on, as Just Before Nightfall situates us in a fully realized and now plainly recognizable Chabrolian universe. For behind those shades we find not troubled lovers, but Charles (Michel Bouquet), who is responsible for the death of naked, lifeless Laura, the wife of his close friend François. It was something less than murder, possibly even much less – the result of kinky sex gone wrong, a strangulation fervently encouraged by the victim, who clearly held the upper hand in their games of domination and submission. But it could have been murder. As he later insists, there was certainly a part of Charles, wracked with guilt over the entire affair, that wished Laura dead. And those were his hands around her neck. Rushing to a nearby bar in a (failed) bid to regain his composure, an obviously rattled Charles bumps into his dear friend François (François Périer) and they engage in small talk. Later that day François will learn that his wife was murdered nearby, probably by her lover. He doesn’t mention the encounter with Charles to the police – why should they bother him? From this moment, Chabrol inverts the familiar Hitchcockian formula: this is not a story about an innocent man relentlessly pursued, it is the weightier, more compromised parable of a decent but guilty man who will likely get away with it. Charles returns home to Hélène (Audran), their magnificent house (François was the architect who designed it), and lovely children. He is scot-free – of everything but the burden of his own guilt. Which turns out to be more than he can bear: and so he confesses to his friend, he confesses to his wife, he recklessly risks exposure to the police (so much so that when he is called down to headquarters for some business regarding a deftly meaningful subplot, one suspects it is a ruse), he even speaks sincerely of turning himself in. But nobody is interested in serving to Charles whatever his proper portion of justice might be; François and Hélène want nothing more than to sweep the unpleasantness under the rug and move on – with measures large and small, they even seek to take on some of that guilt for him. An ambitious reading could see Just Before Nightfall as a metaphor for reluctant guilt of collaborationist France (The Sorrow and the Pity would premiere in French theaters a week after Nightfall opened), but one need not make that leap to see the greatness in this film, which is one for the time capsule.

TEN DAYS WONDER (1971) and DR. POPAUL (1972). As with Chabrol’s first wave, his second can also be divided in two parts, with the latter set featuring still serious but less consistent efforts. Ten Day’s Wonder is a frankly ridiculous movie. It opens with a prodigious scene and enormous promise: Charles (Anthony Perkins) awakens in a Paris hotel room with bloodstained hands and no idea what has happened to him. In desperation, he calls his friend Paul (Michel Piccoli), who delivers him to the home of his eccentric, wealthy father (Orson Welles!), and young, fetching stepmother Hélène (Marlène Jobert, wasted here, much better in her next film, Pialat’s We Won’t Grow Old Together) – and yes, Oedipus has entered the building. Clumsily written, and with Chabrol’s trademark zoom lens here seeming lazy, Ten Days Wonder is at least watchable, with its twists and turns, blackmail, confrontations, and murder, and the pleasures of its irresistible leading men (the experience also netted Chabrol some fine Alsatian meals and lifetime supply of Welles stories).

The same cannot be said of Dr. Popaul, the only irredeemable picture in this otherwise magnificent dozen. From a script by Gégauff, it reflects his worst instincts – would-be outlandishness serving as a thin veil for misogyny. Nominally a black comedy, the titular doctor is played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, here incorrigibly chasing after Mia Farrow (and a bevy of assorted beauties). Structurally unsound – a tasteless, ultimately discarded detour into male bonding rituals morphs into a standard-issue sex farce that finally culminates in an avalanche of plot twists that lack the courage of their implications – the film was a commercial success, proving, presumably, that big stars and a happy ending can go a long way. But Jonathan Rosenbaum has it right: “What I see reveals such directorial contempt or indifference toward the material.”

LES NOCES ROUGES (WEDDING IN BLOOD) (1973) and NADA (1974). Fortunately, Chabrol returned to form – and more familiar terrain (murder, guilt, and meals) – with Les Noces Rouges. Audran and Michel Piccoli shine as lovers Lucienne and Pierre, moved to murder in a story inspired by a similar case that made headlines in France. Chabrol’s swipes at conservative politicians earned the movie the honor of a brief government injunction against its release. And Andrew Sarris was impressed, anointing Les Noces Rouges “the most brilliant new movie of the year,” applauding its “knowing nudge at the grotesque venality of Gaullist politics and politicians,” and lauding Chabrol as “one of the most richly satisfying movie makers in the world today.” A perceptive review in the New York Times was similarly effusive, but aside from an intense Postman Always Rings Twice style murder, and a brilliant scene in which the furtive lovers are confronted by Lucienne’s husband (a demonic descendant of Charles from La Femme Infidele – he is unmoved by the affair but calculates, cunningly, that it can be used to his political advantage), Les Noces Rouges, a fine film steeped in Chabrolian concerns (the movie opens with a quote about guilt by Aeschylus), does not scale the heights of his greatest work.

Nada, Chabrol’s next production, would strike out in a completely different direction – a political thriller about a group of terrorists who kidnap the American ambassador. Perhaps exacting a measure of revenge for his recent dust-up with the censorious authorities, although the murderous Nada gang is in no way romanticized here, it is the French state that really takes it on the chin. Corrupt, dishonest, hypocritical, and indifferent to human life, the thuggish cops and their encouraging superiors (who have calculated that the death of the Ambassador might play to their political advantage) are portrayed as little better than the terrorists. There are treats to behold here – a nice neo-Melvillian kidnapping at a brothel, the weight-of-the-world performance by Maurice Garrel as an aging revolutionary, and, as Nora Sayer observed, “many fine scenes . . . each enhanced by impeccable camerawork” – but as with La Rupture, the pleasures of Nada are tempered by the unsubtlety of the enterprise.

UN PARTIE DE PLAISIR (THE PLEASURE PARTY) (1975). One of the more curious entries in Chabrol’s entire filmography. A serious effort, it takes the Gégauff collaboration to its ultimate conclusion, and it admirably tries to achieve what the Cahiers cohort brashly demanded in the 1950s – a more personal cinema, and one that aspired to a certain type of realism. Well here you have it, in a screenplay by Gégauff, starring Gégauff and his ex-wife Danièle, (and their small child Clémence), in a movie about a troubled marriage, with scenes shot in Gégauff’s actual home (just like Truffaut did in The Soft Skin). The problem is, although the performances are creditable, Gégauff is more or less playing some version of himself – and he seems to be quite an unpleasant fellow. The story is set in motion when his character, Philippe, suggests to Ester (Danièle), that they, too sophisticated for common social conventions, should be free to take other lovers. He confesses, to her guarded dismay, that he has had liaisons when she was traveling – in his words, the way one goes out for coffee and cigarettes. Chabrol’s camera is reliably savvy and observing, the movie scores a few decent philosophical points, and it is to Gégauff’s credit that he does not shy away from putting his most boorish and unpleasant behavior on display. And The Pleasure Party has a significant feminist streak: Ester, infantilized at the start of the picture, thrives under the new arrangement; she takes a job despite his anticipated objections, and even drives and smokes with more authority. Ultimately spurning Philippe, she observes, “I was fine as your reflection, now I exist, you don’t know me.” Unfortunately, that sort of liberation does not sit well, and the movie turns more unpleasant still. Un Partie de Plaisir is a well-crafted, ambitious film, but those who have seen it will not be shocked to learn that Gégauff’s life ended in 1983, on Christmas Eve, when he was stabbed to death by his second wife.

INNOCENTS WITH DIRTY HANDS (1975). Chabrol closed out his second wave on a high note. The last collaboration with André Génovès, Innocents is a great film on its own merits, but it also looks back, providing something of a summary statement of the entire period, even as it peeks forward, anticipating some of the motifs that would emerge more fully in later efforts. In particular, this movie, still a high-stakes interpersonal drama, features more of the sly humor that would season Poulet au Vinaigre (1985), Masques (1987), The Flower of Evil (2003), and Inspector Bellamy (2009), among others. Innocents with Dirty Hands starts out in familiar Chabrol territory – a younger wife, an older, wealthy husband, not enough sex, novel temptations, the exercise of power in small gestures, schemes of murder. And it remains a pleasure to see the usual touchstones, effortlessly arranged: the well-designed home (with a particularly marvelous staircase), the essential meals, the finely integrated location work (fittingly, back full circle to Saint-Tropez, where Les Biches was shot). As the movie begins, Julie (Romy Schneider) is indeed disenchanted with her husband Louis (Rod Steiger), quick to take a lover, and not hard to convince that a few well-placed blows might not solve all problems – but uncharacteristically, from there things are never what they seem. As the situation goes puzzlingly awry, Julie is forced to navigate her way through a series of confrontations with the male gatekeepers of the establishment: bankers, lawyers, policemen, financial advisors – a variety of encounters, each in a different key, that sum to one of the finest performances in Schneider’s career. Innocents is a film in which one special moment follows another. High points include an interrogation that hinges on a missing earring; scenes with an odd couple of detectives (a savvy visitor from Paris and a more provincially sluggish local man), who puzzle through the many twists of the plot while breaking bread; and a long overnight confrontation between Julie and Louis. Also to be savored is the way Chabrol deploys abstracting black backdrops to frame crucial conversations. And then Jean Rochefort shows up and simply steals his two long scenes (watch for the color green in the second of his irresistible interventions). Innocents with Dirty Hands does not have the gravitas of Just Before Nightfall, but it is peak Chabrol.

Chabrol would stumble after Innocents, just as he did at the end of his first wave. He released a couple of real clunkers in rapid succession, including The Twist, which, despite its promising cast (Audran, Bruce Dern, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and Ann-Margret), he would describe to The Independent in 1994 as “the second worst film ever made.” And from there, again as before, he would drift into relative obscurity, continuing to make pictures, some better than others. But remarkably, and again against all expectations, Chabrol had two more grand runs in him: a third wave – thirteen films from 1985 to 1995 (from Poulet au Vinaigre to La Cérémonie), and then, more astonishing still, the streak of seven special films of his final decade (1999-2009), which I have previously discussed here.

Somewhere, Henri Langlois is smiling.

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Works Cited

de Baecque, Antoine and Noel Hërpe, Eric Rohmer: A Biography (New York: Columbia University Press 2014).

Ebert, Roger, “This Man Must Commit Murder,” New York Times, November 29, 1970.

Johnston, Sheila, “Film: One Hell of a Laugh with Claude: Claude Chabrol Made the ‘Second Worst Film Ever,’ One Dud in 80 He Can Afford,” The Independent, October 19, 1994.

Kehr, Dave, “The Rupture,” Chicago Reader (undated).

Monaco, James, The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette (Thirtieth anniversary edition, New York: Sag Harbor, 2004).

Rosenbaum, Jonathan, “Scoundrel in White,” The Chicago Reader, June 24, 1981.

Sarris, Andrew, “’Wedding’: Chabrol the Oceanic,” The Village Voice, May 9, 1974.

Sarris, Andrew, “Ocean Tide: In his 54-film career, Chabrol Was more Interested in Dark Undercurrents Than Making Waves,” Film Comment, November/December 2010.

Sayre, Nora, “Screen: Chabrol’s ‘The Nada Gang’ Is at Playboy,” New York Times, November 7, 1974.

van Gelder, Lawrence, “Chabrol’s Memorable ‘Wedding in Blood’” New York Times May 23, 1974.