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La Décade prodigieuse
1971 Thriller / Drama
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Credits
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Director: Claude Chabrol
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Script: Eugène Archer, Frederic Dannay, Paul Gardner, Paul Gégauff, Manfred Lee, based on the novel "Ten Days' Wonder" by Ellery Queen
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Photo: Jean Rabier
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Music: Pierre Jansen
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Cast: Anthony Perkins (Charles Van Horn),
Michel Piccoli (Paul Regis),
Marlène Jobert (Helene Van
Horn),
Orson Welles (Theo Van Horn),
Guido Alberti (Ludovic),
Ermanno Casanova (One-Eyed Old Man),
Mathilde Ceccarelli (Receptionist),
Eric Frisdal (Charles as child)
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Country: France
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Language: French
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Runtime: 101 min
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Aka: Ten Days Wonder
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Summary
A young man, Charles, wakes up one morning in a hotel room, his hands stained with blood.
He has no recollection of the events of the past few days.
Half convinced he is going mad, he appeals to his former
university professor, Paul Régis, to stay with him at his father’s country house
and analyse his behaviour. Charles’ father, Théo,
is a domineering eccentric who insists that all his family dress in 1920s garb.
He is married to a young woman, Hélène, whom he adopted when she
was a small girl. Since childhood, Charles and Hélène
have been close, but recently they have started to have an affair.
Disaster threatens when Charles’ love letters to Hélène are stolen
and someone begins to blackmail the adulterous wife. With
no income of his own, Charles is compelled to steal money from his father to pay off the
mysterious blackmailer. When Paul finds himself implicated
in the staged theft of Hélène’s jewels, he has no recourse but to betray
Charles. It is only after he has left this strange menagerie
that Paul realises the truth. Someone is about to be killed...
Review
La Decade prodigieuse is not the most well-oiled
of Claude Chabrol’s thrillers, and coming after such excellent examples of the genre as
Le
Boucher (1969) et
Que la bête meure (1969), it is something
of a let down. Whilst the director succeeds in sustaining
an aura of grim menace - for which the often weird cinematography is largely responsible
- inept plotting, poor editing and weak dialogue make this a painfully stilted work.
Even the combined talents of four great actors cannot breach the stifling envelope
of complacency that shrouds this film, although casting Anthony Perkins (a.k.a. Norman
Bates) in the role of yet another (presumed) psychopath and Awesome Welles as an all-knowing
patriarch is hardly likely to have won Chabrol many awards for original thinking.
The denouement to the story is rather ingenious, but the pay off is greatly diminished
by the faltering narrative that precedes it and a shameless lack of depth in the characterisation
(Marlène Joberts’ character is so two dimensional that the actress could have been
replaced by a full-size cardboard cut-out without anyone noticing).
Chabrol was himself dissatisfied with this film, citing as one of the reasons for
its failure the fact that, for commercial reasons, the film had to be made in English.
This would account for the ropey dialogue - which is even
worse in the badly dubbed French version. Mr Welles’ insistence
on wearing a fake green nose doesn’t help matters either...
© James Travers 2005
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