Synopsis
The story of a journalist in southern Germany who stays with a novelist and his wife and gradually begins to destroy the young couple's lives.
The Third Lover
1962 ‘L'Œil du Malin’ Directed by Claude Chabrol
Cast
Director
Producers
Writers
Editor
Cinematography
Composer
Sound
Studios
Countries
Primary Language
Spoken Languages
Alternative Titles
Das Auge des Bösen, L'occhio del maligno, El ojo maligno, 魔鬼的眼, O Olho do Mal, Око лукавого, 세 번째 사랑
Releases by Date
Theatrical
-
FranceU
Releases by Country
France
02 May 1962
- TheatricalU
Popular reviews
More-
“The Third Lover” of Claude Chabrol’s film refers to an interloping pretender of a writer who ingratiates himself into a rich German couple’s lives. It could also refer to Chabrol himself - the great emulator of Alfred Hitchcock, now trying to consume the master.
While every crevice of “Lover” drips in the influence of Hitchcock, the film’s foundation is provided by Shakespeare. The plot more or less follows “Othello,” with a jealous French writer taking the role of the scheming Iago; warping the narrative around his justification for undoing the otherwise stable marriage he intrudes upon.
The blending of the Iago insert’s Shakespearean soliloquy into a noir-style voiceover is an ingenious manipulation by Chabrol. The choice elevates the obsession of…
-
A key Claude Chabrol film, summing his early New Wave days as well as pointing towards his late 60’s thrillers. A French writer suffering from a severe case of class jealousy plays Yago to a more successful German writer’ Othello as the memories of World War II are turned by Chabrol into a unescapable bourgeois hell. The French intellectual can only look envious at Germany’s reconstruction until the realization that its successful surfaces are a sham, force him to act violent and spiteful. Chabrol mise en scene constant evokes the film’s French title (The Evil Eye). The nasty malicious point of view that often lurks in the shadows of his early films (think of Brialy on Les Cousins) has rarely being put to such an effective use.
-
Hitchcockian subjectivity applied for malicious burgeois melodrama. So a more direct Chabrol movir than usual. One of his stronger early ones.
-
Cinematic Time Capsule
1962 Marathon - Film #27”All their cheerfulness and joy was irritating”
Have you ever noticed how some people aren’t happy unless they’re miserable?
Take Albin, for instance. He’s a young handsome writer who finds himself befriended by the happiest couple in Germany. And yet, all he can think about is how to plot petty acts of revenge in the hopes of bringing everybody down. He’s like the Debbie Downer of French cinema.
Claude Chabrol presents this tense and mysterious drama in which you’re never quite sure where it’s going, but wherever it is can’t be good. And it’s another solid example of his ongoing experiment to try and fuse French new wave methods with Hitchcockian sensibilities.
”Suddenly, I had the idea to commit a crime that night”
-
so glad i found this little gem on netflix, sadly it fell into oblivion when it comes to la nouvelle vague but definitely one of my new favorites!! the score was fantastic and i was quite blown away with the editing. the cast does a wonderful job as well and the way it was directed makes the plot very engaging. loved it!! jacques charrier is so hot in this too.
-
“I know I’m a loser, but at least I’m fully aware of it.”
The Third Lover is an early psychological thriller by Claude Chabrol showing him finding his true subjects: adultery, sexual jealousy, murder. Albin (Jacques Charrier) is an unsuccessful, frustrated novelist forced to report on German life from Munich for a French newspaper. He learns that Andreas Hartman (Walther Reyer), a famous novelist, lives nearby and forces himself into the lives of Andreas and his French wife, Helene (Stephane Audran). Albin is jealous both of Andreas’s success and his relationship with Helene. When Andreas embarrasses him before Helene, Albin swears he begins thinking about revenge. When Helene rejects his advances, he becomes even more miffed.
“Due to them, I…
-
Avoids being a fascinating mechanical exercise (genre as subjectivity, nationalistic/economic tensions reconfigured as adultery genre) entirely through a relentlessly off-center approach to image/narration sequencing and a deep-rooted meanness that's pretty much like nothing else I can think of.
That final match of first person narration and the extreme wide shot of the maid running into the now empty great house is perhaps the best indicator of the density of ideas (and astringency of tone) to be found here.
-
-
Claude Chabrol's The Third Lover opened here technically in 1963, and about thirty-eight people saw it, while everyone else thronged to see Tom Jones. There is no particular moral to be deduced from the fact that the Chabrol is infinitely superior to the Richardson. Merit and popularity intersect only infrequently and then usually for the wrong reasons. (Taste can be measured as the difference between the number of people who started reading Lolita and the number who finished reading Pale Fire.) The American release tide is misleadingly salacious in terms of the original French title, L'Oeil du Malin, which suggests the eye or point of view of a cunning rogue. The Third Lover is mainly an exercise in telling a…
-
Middle class jealousy and petit bourgeois frustrations as a manipulative game of manners and hypocrisy. One of Chabrol’s most precise and expansive exercises formally. Beyond its intriguing concept, the mise en scène has so many incredibly resourceful and acute ideas, and the way the film’s masterful visual flow meshes with the narration and the actors’ good tuning is simply a spectacle to witness.
-
This guy just like that decided to be a hater, stalker and destroy lives. I respect it.
-
