Le Trio infernal
1974 Comedy / Crime / Horror
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Credits
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Summary
Marseilles, 1919. Georges Sarret is a distinguished and respected lawyer, recently
honoured for his services in the First World War. He takes as his lover Philomène
Schmidt, a young German woman, who has just lost her job and home. To enable Philomène
to remain in France, Georges finds her a husband - who dies conveniently of natural causes
a month after the wedding. Georges repeats the trick with Philomène's sister,
Catherine - marrying her off to an old man who dies suddenly so that the scheming trio
can profit from his life insurance. When an accomplice in the scheme, Marcel Chambon,
threatens to blackmail them, Georges and his two lovers have no option but to kill him
and his mistress. Having dissolved the bodies in sulphuric acid, Georges hires another
man to pose as Chambon so that he can secure his assets. Flush with the success
of this venture, Georges proposes his most ambitious scam: he will insure Catherine’s
life with five separate insurance companies; a young orphan woman who is dying from tuberculosis
will provide Catherine’s death certificate when the moment comes. Unfortunately,
the scheme does not go quite as planned...
Review
Francis Girod made his directoral début with one of the most controversial French
films of the 1970s – an eccentric yet supremely stylish black comedy in which two of the
best-loved actors of the time, Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider, play two irredeemably
nefarious crooks. The film’s notoriety was guaranteed by its worldwide distribution
and some over-the-top (but probably justified) press reaction to the film’s most shocking
scene – the one in which the villains dispose of two naked bodes in a bath of acid.
Without any regard to any notion of good taste or the sensibilities of his audience, Girod
goes so far as to show the bodies at various stages of decomposition and follows this
up with a protracted mildly comic sequence in which the infernal trio empty the contents
of the baths (with a kitchen ladle and bucket). As this is going on, one female
villain attempts to ladle spaghetti out of a pan in the kitchen (with a fork, since the
ladle has found another purpose), whilst the other is making sexual overtures to the male
villain. Not what you might call family viewing (although pretty mild in comparison
with what now passes as acceptable entertainment for the under 12s).
At the time, the thing which most shocked cinema audiences was Romy Schneider portraying a truly nasty piece of work. For years, the actress had struggled to shake off her image as the adorable Sissi, a sickeningly sweet character she played in a series of films in the 1950s. It is reported that Schneider’s main motivation for appearing in Le Trio infernal was to finish once and for all with Sissi and allow her to widen her repertoire – both of which happened (with the measured subtlety of someone cracking open a walnut with a kilogram of high explosives). Her portrayal of the nymphomaniac killer Philomène is one her darkest, most brilliant creations. This is not a two dimensional villain, but a horrifyingly believable character, one whose external show of cool elegance barely conceals a thoroughly twisted soul whose perverse actions derive ultimately from a terrible sense of tortured vulnerability. If Romy Schneider is the Devil’s handmaiden, Michel Piccoli is the Devil himself. In one of his most outrageous – and, it must be said, entertaining – performances, Piccoli appears to relish every second of his character’s evil exploits, luring innocent victims into his web with an irresistible charm before devouring them with the same gentlemanly etiquette of a bon vivant enjoying a sumptuous dish in Paris’ most exclusive restaurant. The surreal comic nature of the character only serves to heighten his sense of "otherness". Piccoli is not portraying a human being by any known definition of that word; he is a monster more terrifying than anything the entire horror genre as ever yet shown us, a creation that will chill the blood in even the most fearless of cinemagoers. Perhaps the most shocking thing about Le Trio infernal is the fact that it is not a work of fiction but is in fact closely based on a real-life case. In 1934, Georges Sarret was guillotined for his litany of crimes, protesting his innocence (in spite of incontrovertible evidence against him) right up to the very end. The film spares us this sad denouement to Sarret’s life and instead concludes with a tongue-in-cheek happy ending. (If, as some reckon, marriage is Hell, then maybe Sarret does get his just deserts.) As well as relating a true story, in which every macabre turn is shown in grisly detail, the film also provides a telling reflection of the kind of society in which these gruesome events too place. The privations of World War I over, the upper strata of French society quickly fell into the mire of unseemly decadence and corruption. For the well-heeled bourgeois elite, it was "snouts in the trough" time, an era when the unscrupulous could get rich quick, and the nouvelle riche could indulge their tastes for luxurious excess whilst the vast majority of hard working men and women struggled to earn enough to feed their families. Artists, writers and filmmakers would take great pleasure in mocking this group of parasitic, self-serving mediocrities, but none with greater effect than the legendary film director, Luis Buñuel, whose works and unique comic style Le Trio infernal often calls to mind.
© James Travers 2005
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