Like Henri-Georges Clouzot, George Franju is a French director who makes it hard to make sweeping statements about the state of that country’s national cinema in the fifties. If one takes much of the polemic written by Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and others writing in Cahiers Du Cinema at the time at face value, it can often be easy to think that French films of the period were primarily stuffy, bourgeois and retrograde. Yet along with Clouzot, Robert Bresson, the early work of Alain Resnais and others, Franju created a series of films that while seemingly conventional on the surface, are simultaneously charged with a near transgressive power.