1974.Piekielne trio (Le Trio infernal).avi

Piekielne trio (Le Trio infernal)
gatunek: Komedia kryminalna
premiera: 22 maja 1974 (Świat)
reżyseria: Francis Girod
scenariusz: Solange Fasquelle (novel), Francis Girod

Obsada:
Michel Piccoli - Georges Sarret
Romy Schneider - Philomena Schmidt
Mascha Gonska - Catherine Schmidt
Philippe Brizard - Chambon
Jean Rigaux - Villette
Monica Fiorentini - Magali

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...

Le Trio infernal marked an auspicious directorial debut for Francis Girod and proved to be one of the most controversial French films of the 1970s. An outlandish yet supremely stylish black comedy, it provoked a fierce reaction in the French press, with some commentators almost spitting blood in moral outrage at the film’s apparent depravity. The fact that the film featured two of French cinema’s most high-profile actors of the time, Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider, merely fuelled the controversy. The film’s notoriety stemmed largely from its most shocking sequence - the one in which the main protagonists dispose of two naked bodes in a bath of acid. With few, if any, concessions to good taste, Girod goes so far as to show the bodies at their various stages of decomposition and follows this up with a protracted piece of farce in which the killers empty the gory contents of the baths with a soup ladle and bucket. Not what you might call cosy family viewing.