LES DIABOLIQUES (The Devils, or The Fiends, 1955) **1/2 You've got to admit that the title sounds much more sinister than "The Devils," or "The Varmints," so they're doing something right, right off the bat by working in French. It's a taut tale of love triangles and betrayal, bad school food and drunken hitchhikers, nosey neighbors and loud bath tubs, dirty swimming pools and retired detectives on the case all studiously put together by Henri-Georges Clouzot in a manner that suggests suffocation, though perhaps not in the specific manner of drowning. For all that it doesn't reach out and get you, you have to kind of jump in and demand to stay there in order not to let your mind wander to things like, "Man, I can't imagine casting my wife in a movie with a script where a guy plays with her ass." Vera Clouzot is the gem of the cast but you have to wonder what the Hollywood elite were drinking (remember, it was only the '50s) when they gave this one a share of Umberto D's Best Foreign Film Award. Fun and well executed movie that can't be blamed for inspiring the less talented to remake it.