Les Diaboliques is littered with visual symbols, but perhaps its most telling imagery is that which is shown as early as the very first frame – though the first-time viewer will be unable to identify exactly what it is. The film’s titles are presented over algae infested water, water which will eventually become key to the film’s central mystery, but also more generally a metaphor for some of the film’s many levels of meaning, about what we see on the surface of things, and what is really lying beneath them.

On the murky surface of the story lie the three main characters: Michel, the headmaster of a run-down boarding school for boys, is a short-tempered, abusive womanizer; his wife Christina, a teacher at the school but also its owner, and whose family money her husband is all too keen to exploit; and finally Nicole, also a teacher at the school, and with whom Michel has been conducting a very public affair with for a long time. How French.

From the outset, we can see that the women have a common resentment of the cruel headmaster; Christina knows she is being exploited as well as being publicly humiliated by his continuing affair with another woman, while early on Nicole is shown sporting dark sunglasses which are to hide the black eye that Michel had administered the night before. The two women, led by the domineering Nicole, hatch a plan to rid themselves of this man: lure him to a lodging house, drug him with sedatives and drown him in the bath, returning the body later to the school swimming pool to give the appearance of his having died by accident.

The plan succeeds, but the weaker Christina, unable to wait for her dead husband to be discovered, panics and hurriedly orders the swimming pool to be drained, since the water is so dirty that the body has yet to be seen. This is duly done, but there is no sign of Michel’s body. And when there are reports of him being seen around the school and town, coupled with his suit being returned by the dry-cleaners, both the mystery and dramatic tension begin to thicken further.

If the viewer thinks they know where they are, then they are in for more than a few surprises. Much has been made of Clouzot being ‘the French Hitchcock’, and not without reason; indeed, the British auteur himself wanted to film this story, but narrowly missed out on the rights to it, going on to adapt authors Boileau and Narcejac’s Sueurs froides: d’entre les morts as Vertigo (1958) instead. Much like Vertigo, as well as Psycho (1960) which would follow, the suspense of Les Diaboliques gently creeps up on the viewer rather than going straight for the jugular. Director Clouzot keeps the film deliberately slow-paced; while most thrillers are quick to establish the mystery element, in Les Diaboliques the murder plot takes nearly half of the film to come to fruition.

The deliberately slow pacing, at the expense of narrative velocity, allows much greater character development. While Michel is generally seen to be a shallow, one-dimensional monster, the two women provide an interesting dichotomy: the sturdily-built, almost macho Nicole is a stark contrast to the angelic almost girl-like daintiness of Christina, and there is a strange air of sexual tension between the two women, predating the similar dynamic found in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). With her cropped platinum blonde hair and sharply cut suits, Nicole cuts an angular screen presence, dominating the screen whenever present, as she dominates control over the women’s murderous plan.

While the character of Nicole is a fascinating masculine femme fatale, Christina, played by Clouzot’s wife, Vera. represents many different things: feminity, but also Latin American exoticism, as well as chaste Roman Catholicism – her lodgings are somewhat akin to a cross between a religious shrine and a confessional booth, once again in contrast to Nicole and her more functionally decorated house. There are some strictly autobiographical details here: Vera Clouzot was originally from Brazil, and her health problems are replicated in her character here (tragically, she would die from a heart-attack five years after the release of Les Diaboliques).

The boarding-school setting may seem fairly insubstantial to the plot, but the film’s final scene gives away something of its relevance; a schoolboy, who throughout the film has been chastised for telling lies and drawing on the school walls, claims to have seen a ghost. When this is dismissed by the adults, he walks off wearily. His creative impulses have been stifled at every turn by the grown-up world, the supposedly more mature and respectable adults, but who are actually the more childish, petulant and unruly – the ‘diaboliques’ of the film’s title. The dirty swimming pool is illustrative of the general neglect of the school and of its pupils, which begs the comparison to François Truffaut’s soon-to-be-made Les quatres cents coups (1959).

If the film’s famous penultimate scene has a feeling of over-familiarity, then it is illustrative of how iconic it has become; not as famous as ‘that’ shower scene, but nearly. And there is one other famous legacy that the film has left: two-thirds of the way through, a clumsy, unassuming, seemingly absent-minded police detective named Inspector Fichet shuffles onto the scene, and susses everything out before anyone else does. The shabby raincoat, the cigar, the battered car, the inane non-sequitur questions – i think all Peter Falk needed to add was the line ‘just one more thing’ in order to make his Columbo.

Rightly regarded as one of the greatest of all films, the power of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves lies in its simplicity, and as such perfectly embodies the spirit of the Italian postwar neorealism movement which, though shortlived, was hugely influential in the development of modern cinema.

Cinemas are often born out of revolutions and historical circumstance: the Soviet Montage movement of 1920s Russia derived from the Bolshevik Revolution, German Expressionism from its slow post-First World War economic recovery, the Spanish New Wave would emerge from the ashes of the Franco regime; filmmaking cannot lie outside of its social and political context.

In Italy, a country with a long history of filmmaking, the Depression of the early 1930s had led to a slump in its cinematic output, and the Fascist government decided that the medium was of such importance to the national culture that it should be resuscitated and propped up financially. The film school Centro Sperimentale was founded in 1935, and a new studio complex known as Cinecittà was built on the outskirts of Rome. The Mussolini regime kept the industry afloat through subsidy, allowing both grand epics as well as smaller, regional dialect-based films to be made, with less worry towards financing.

Italy, unlike Nazi Germany, did not necessarily strive to foster a distinctly propagandist national cinema. Hitler and Goebbels were both keen cinema-goers, and though the work of the likes of Leni Riefenstahl, tried to glamorize Fascist ideology on the big screen (though her Triumph of the Will and Olympia can be considered interesting films, it is a touch ironic that some of the greatest filmmakers in Germany, among them Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, moved into exile during the Hitler regime). But while there was limited artistic freedom in Germany, Italian directors enjoyed considerably more autonomy over their output; Mussolini did view nearly every film produced, but almost never banned one outright.

It is under these conditions that the group of directors grouped under the Neorealism umbrella developed, including Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, and a man from Lazio named Vittorio De Sica. De Sica came from a theatre background, but had made the transition to filmmaking through light comedies such as Maddalena, zero in condotta (1940) and Teresa Venerdì (1941). His first foray into more serious work was I Bambini ci guardano [The Children are Watching Us] (1944), a story of familial disintegration seen through the eyes of a young boy.

The film was a collaboration with writer Cesare Zavattini, who would go on to write nearly all of De Sica’s screenplays, including his next film, Sciuscià [Shoeshine] (1946), a story about two young boys who stumble into a life of crime. Borrowing its visual aesthetic from Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (1945), and a pacing influenced by Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), it was De Sica’s first truly great film, winning him critical acclaim, and even an honorary Academy Award. For their next project, the writer-director team wanted to examine more closely the destruction and upheaval in post-war Italy.

What they produced was Bicycle Thieves, based on the novel by Luigi Bartolini. Set in postwar Rome, it centres on Ricci, an unemployed man desperately seeking work in order to feed his wife and young son Bruno. He finds a job, putting up posters around the city, but the job requires him to have a bicycle as transport; he has already had to pawn his bicycle, so he and his wife decide to sell their wedding sheets in order to buy it back.

It is implicit in the title what is going to happen, and Ricci must scour the streets of the city in order to try to find the bicycle he so needs. The film suffered from the unfortunate American mis-translation of its title to The Bicycle Thief; this is to undermine the elegance of both the title and the film itself. The thieves concept is important; Ricci, in his desparation, attempts to steal another bicycle himself, only to be caught and set upon by an angry mob. Seeing both the fear and shock on his young son’s face, he realises that he himself has been reduced to the level of the film’s supposed villain; and the original thief himself is perhaps cast in a new light – was he stealing the bicycle for similarly desperate but honorable intentions?

The setup of the film elegantly poses these questions, as well as showing the humiliation, despair and rapacity of life in postwar Italy. What is significant is that during his search, Ricci’s constant encounters with ambivalent authority figures, whether the police, his labour union or the Church itself. And as he is seen resorting to more and more desperate measures, the father-son bond between Ricci and Bruno can be seen to be eroded, paternal authority also breaking down in the situation, though the film ends with Bruno’s moving acceptance of his father’s imperfections, as they walk hand in hand down the road back home.

One striking aspect of the film, and in the best neorealist films in general, is the use of non-professional actors. One of the tenets of the movement was that actors should be chosen whose lives were similar to those being portrayed on screen; witness the casting of real local Sicilian fishermen in Visconti’s La Terra trema (1948). In Bicycle Thieves, the casting of Lamberto Maggiorani in the lead role was a masterstroke; Maggiorani was a factory worker from Rome who had unsuccesfully dabbled in acting, but his believable, pathos-filled performance here shows the benefit of using actors who can relate to the circumstances of the film.

Bicycle Thieves was very much a product of its time, and De Sica would soon find himself moving away from strict neorealism towards different aesthetics; his Miracolo a Milano (1951), Umberto D. (1952), L’oro di Napoli (1954) and La Ciociara (1960) all stand as abiding classics of Italian cinema, and he would venture back into popularist comedy with the Sophia Loren vehicles Ieri, oggi, domani (1963) and Matrimonio all’italiana (1964). But Bicycle Thieves is his most consistently highly praised film, because of the universality of its simple theme: how society strips the dignity and self-respect of a man just trying to do his best to look after his family.