Les Diaboliques should need no introduction. In many ways it's become the archetype of modern thriller-dom. Would, for example, the lamentable Fatal Attraction end quite like it does without Clouzot? Not, of course, that that's a recommendation.

Vera Clouzot and Simone Signoret are vulnerable wife and self-confident mistress respectively to Paul Meurisse's tyrannical, bullying headmaster in a seedy, decaying boarding-school stocked with brats and self-serving teachers. As the film opens, the women are about to swing into painstakingly plotted revenge, luring the violent Delasalle to his death. They transport his lifeless body hazardously back to the school, dumping it in the brooding, stagnant swimming-pool. But relief slowly turns to horror as Clouzot's unrelenting, horribly misanthropic camera gazes on.

Taken from Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac's novel She Was No More, this is the best film Hitchcock never made. (Reputedly Hitch wanted to option the original story himself, and later made his masterpiece - Vertigo - from a novel, D'Entre les Morts, by the same pair.) The master's hands are all over it, in the callous manipulation of its performers and audience, even down the Psycho-like coda asking viewers not to disclose its tortuous twists. The pace is deliberately slow, very slow in its second-half, loading up on fabulous black and white doom before the extended humdinger of a Grand Guignol climax. Clouzot was a virtuoso of bleak. (The prolific Claude Chabrol recently adapted an old Clouzot script to make the dazzling, equally cheerless L'Enfer).

The acting is terrific. Holy innocent Clouzot rolls her eyes and grabs her weak heart with silent movie aplomb, while the hard-as-nails Signoret, all tight dresses and even tighter hair, is just sublime. Leonard Cohen-alike Meurisse spits and growls like the classic movie baddie he is. And Charles Vanel's eerie old detective who inveigles his way into investigating the headmaster's disappearance looks to be a blueprint in every detail - manner and raincoat - for Peter Faulk's Columbo.

One part suspense-thriller, one part classy ghost movie, Les Diaboliques is currently set for the Hollywood remake treatment, pushing the thing before the cameras again, with Isabelle Adjani and, surprise surprise, Sharon Stone. (Be first on your block to remember what they a mauling they served on The Vanishing.) Maybe the film is too old, too creaky now to work for a modern audience without it gets radically reworked. Okay, it's a totally calculating, icy-cold one-trick pony of a movie, but it's also a great, scary, macabre one-trick pony. European Noir scarcely came any better.