Claude Chabrol is assured of a place in any study of the new French cinema, for he was the first of the Cahiers group to make a feature film and as a producer gave Godard, Rivette and Rohmer valuable assistance on their first efforts, but there is less certainty as to the actual merits of his work as a director.

Until his recent spy films Chabrol had concerned himself principally with personal relationships. His early films depict the close, almost homosexual, relationship of two young men, and a constant theme is the precariousness of love, which, indeed, is treated as almost purely illusory in several works: L'Oeil du Malin, where the apparently successful marriage is undermined by a tissue of lies, and Landru, the hero of which makes his living by robbing and killing gullible women who believe his flattering words of love. Chabrol's attitude to his characters is one of unmitigated coldness, partly because of his belief that people in general are stupid and that their fascination lies precisely in this stupidity: "Foolishness is infinitely more fascinating than intelligence, infinitely more profound. Intelligence has limits whilst foolishness has none." Typical in this respect is his attitude to the shopgirls of Les Bonnes Femmes: "I wanted to make a film about stupid people that was very vulgar and deeply stupid … When we wrote the film, the people were, for Gégauff, fools. It was a film about fools." Chabrol's detachment does allow him to manipulate his characters like puppets, but precludes him from arousing any deep emotion. He is unable to portray romance with any lyricism and the love scenes in A Double Tour, for instance, are utterly lacking in grace or passion. Chabrol's best love scene is undoubtedly that between Jacqueline and her motorcyclist in Les Bonnes Femmes and this, significantly enough, is a mere prelude to murder.

Despite a tendency towards documentary, apparent in the distributed versions of Le Beau Serge and Les Bonnes Femmes and even more marked, it would seem, in their original scripts, Chabrol's work reveals only a restricted grasp of the problem of fitting characters into a convincing social environment. His repeated attempts at portraying bourgeois households are singularly unsubtle and carry little conviction, so that only a limited impact is made by those outsiders (Laszlo in A Double Tour or Yvan in Ophélia) who are intent on attacking middle-class behaviour and values. Caricature is not limited, however, to the handling of the bourgeoisie. Even Le Beau Serge contained a quaint rustic sub-plot, involving the vamp (Bernadette Lafont) and her stepfather, that tended to obscure the central issues, and in the subsequent works this element of the grotesque has increased until all the characters in Ophélia, except perhaps the heroine, are mentally unbalanced. This development is linked with Chabrol's basically unserious attitude to film-making: explaining the differences between the original script for Ophélia and the completed film Chabrol said: "I pushed it more towards having fun." Fun, in Chabrol's sense, involves the inclusion of long eating scenes and dotting the films with absurdly overacted minor characters. (pp. 47-9)

If one wishes to pin down the essence of Chabrol's style, one cannot do better than consider the short episode La Muette which he made in 1964 for the film Paris Vu Par … Not only is this a highly professional piece of work, based on an interesting notion (the possibilities of opting out of family life by means of earplugs) and showing a sheer technical skill which the subsequent spy films have confirmed, it also incorporates all Chabrol's obsessional quirks: a grotesque caricature of bourgeois life, interminable eating scenes, a married couple whose only communication is by shouts and quarrels, a sexy maid, a startling and gratuitous ending of violent death and, significantly enough, the director himself lustily overacting and pulling rude faces at his wife … and at the audience itself. (p. 49)