Robert Thomas

I've written more than once about that very interesting French playwright Robert Thomas. Thanks to Bob Cornwell, whose knowledge of Eurocrime, as well as Britcrime, is encyclopaedic, I have received an extract from Claude Mespiede's massive tome about the genre, which - most regrettably - has yet to be translated into English. I do hope that someday a translation is made, as it sounds like a tremendous piece of work. Meanwhile, my wife, whose French is better than mine, has kindly translated the entry about Thomas:


'Thomas, Robert (28 September 1930, Gap, Hautes-Alpes – 3 November 1989, Paris.)

At the age of fourteen, Robert Thomas discovered a passion for contemporary theatre. He left home just before taking his baccalaureat, going to Paris so he could write and act in comedies there. He paid for his theatre course with his salary as a telegrapher and worked as an extra in over fifty films. At the same time, he wrote seven plays (which were all rejected.) In 1950, he applied to Pierre Dux who employed him in Il faut marier Maman (You must marry Mother) with Denise Grey. So he began a career in the theatre, acting notably in La Main de Cesar (Caesar’s hand) and Les Belles Bacchantes (The Beautiful Bacchantes.) His first two plays, Huit Femmes (Eight Women ) and Madam Trait d’Union (Mrs Hyphen) were put on in Nice, in 1958 and 1959, but did not really achieve success.

Robert Thomas’ determination was rewarded by the triumph of a detective play, Piege pour un home seul ( Trap for a lonely man), produced at the Bouffes-Parisiens on 28 January 1960. It tells the story of a young couple on honeymoon: the man waits for his wife to come back following an argument. The wait becomes unusually long and starts a police enquiry which continues until a woman presents herself as the missing wife. The husband denounces her as an impostor but a number of witnesses confirm the young woman’s identity…This play, rewarded by the Prix du Quai des Orfevres, was translated and produced all over the world.

The next year, Robert Thomas rewrote his first play, Eight Women, also a detective mystery: trapped by the snow in an isolated house, the woman of a single family carry out an enquiry to discover who has killed the master of the house. In spite of conventions and apparent politeness, they play, behind closed doors, a game of truth as merciless as it is pitiable, revealing their weaknesses, their lies, their secret resentments: no one is spared. The play was adapted for the cinema by Francois Ouzon in 2002.

In 1966, the author reunited, in La Perruche et le Poulet ( The Parrot and the Chicken), the famous couple of the radio programme Sur le Banc (On the Bench): Jane Sourza and Raymond Souplex. A lawyer’s secretary is getting ready to close the office when she finds her boss stabbed. By the time the police arrive on the scene, the body has disappeared. Has there been a crime? A series of surprises and a denouement completely unforeseen prove to the policeman (the chicken) that the talkative secretary (the parrot) was right. Other important plays by Robert Thomas worth mentioning are Le Deuxieme coup de Feu (The second shot) 1965, Assassins associes (Muderers associated) 1965, Freddy 1969. Un ami..imprevu (an unforeseen friend) 1969 in the style of Agatha Christie, Double jeu (Double Game) 1970, La Poulette aux oeufs d’or (The chicken and the golden eggs) 1973, La chambre Mandarine (The Mandarin Room) 1974, Les Batards (the Bastards) 1979, Princesse Baraka (Princess Baraka)1995.

A film director, especially for Darryl Zannuck, he also produced television series, sometimes writing episodes and sometimes appearing in them. From 1970 until his death in 1989, Robert Thomas was the Director of The Edward VII Theatre.

With his lively and rhythmic suspense comedies, Robert Thomas knew how to introduce a certain French spirit into the world of the detective play, (which up to that point had seemed reserved for Anglo Saxon authors) yet without claiming to do anything other than entertain his audience.'

Chase a Crooked Shadow: review

I posted recently on the similarities between the Osborn-Sinclair screenplay for the 1958 film Chase a Crooked Shadow, and Robert Thomas’s play Trap for a Lonely Man. The film, which is in black and white, is a minor classic of psychological suspense. Even if you know the essentials of the plot (which in its various guises is pretty familiar these days) there is a good deal of pleasure to be had from watching events unfold.

A diamond heiress called Kimberley Prescott (played by Anne Baxter) is spending time at a villa on the coast near Barcelona. An apparently doting elderly uncle lives nearby. But one day, an enigmatic stranger (Richard Todd, who died just before Christmas) turns up on her doorstep, claiming to be her brother Ward, a racing driver. The snag is that Ward died a year back in a car accident, and Kimberley identified the body.

She calls the police (in the form of the eternally sinister Herbert Lom) but the intruder’s ID is in order, and the cop departs, thinking that the girl is neurotic. ‘Ward’ brings in a female associate (Faith Brook, whom I have always thought an under-estimated performer) and even a new butler, and Kimberley’s terror mounts as it becomes clear that the newcomers are playing their mysterious game for very high stakes.

There are some great twists in the story, the acting is competent, and Julian Bream’s guitar music adds to the atmosphere created by Michael Anderson’s direction. This is a very entertaining thriller, and at less than five quid from Amazon, it was also a real bargain.

Footnote one – Faith Brook’s father Clive was also an actor, and one of his final roles was in the film of that Philip Macdonald classic, The List of Adrian Messenger. Much earlier, he was in a 1920 version of Trent’s Last Case, and he also played Sherlock Holmes in three films.

Footnote two – Herbert Lom was born in Prague, and his real name was Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru. Bet you didn’t know that!

Criminal Connections

Before Christmas, I wrote about Robert Thomas’s famous play Trap for a Lonely Man and suggested that one of the four films based upon it was Chase a Crooked Shadow. It was pointed out to me by Jamie Sturgeon (not only a very good bookseller, but a mine of info on matters criminous) that Chase a Crooked Shadow dated back to 1958, while the original version of the Thomas play seems to have been first performed in 1960.

Intrigued, I have now bought the DVD of Chase a Crooked Shadow and watched (and enjoyed) it – more about this shortly. Jamie is absolutely right – and the screenplay of Chase a Crooked Shadow was written by David D. Osborn and Charles Sinclair, about whom I know nothing else. One or two reviewers comment that the film, with limited sets, gives the impression of being based upon a stage play, but it appears Osborn and Sinclair wrote it directly for the cinema.

There is a strong similarity between the twisty plot of Chase a Crooked Shadow and the Thomas play – I can only assume this is a coincidence, but it does explain why some sources list the film as being a version of the Thomas play.

But the story doesn’t end there. In the 1980s, the screenplay was belatedly adapted for the stage, and given the title Double Cut. The writer this time was Alfred Shaughnessy, now deceased, but famous as script editor and chief editor for ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’. He wrote a good deal for television and stage, plus a couple of novels. It seems that to this day, Double Cut is still regularly performed in regional theatres – as is Trap for a Lonely Man.

Finally, Bob Cornwell has sent me an extract from a fascinating and evidently voluminous French encyclopaedia compiled by Claude Mespiede about crime fiction, which adds more detail to my knowledge of Thomas. I shall share this info (the particular entry is written by a French bibliographer, Jean-Marie David, on this blog on a future occasion.

8 Women

The snow I featured in my photos the other day has turned to ice, and our little cul-de-sac has transformed into a skating rink. Too dangerous to contemplate shifting the car. So what could be more appropriate than to seize the chance to watch a film set in a snowbound mansion?

This is 8 Women, aka 8 Femmes, and I became aware of it thanks to the very informative comments by Philip and Bob Cornwell in relation to my recent post about the play Trap for a Lonely Man, written by Robert Thomas. Thomas also wrote the play on which 8 Women is based, although the credits say that the movie ‘liberally adapted’ it, and this I can well believe.

In fact, the film version followed more than 40 years after its theatrical source, and my guess is that director Francois Ozon utilised Thomas’s clever multiple plot twists, whilst turning them into something Thomas never expected: a send-up of a classic, Christiesque scenario, - with songs! The resultant mish-mash of murder and music is weird, but very watchable – especially because the cast is quite dazzling. It includes Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant, and Emmanuelle Beart, an extraordinary wealth of glamour and talent.

The eponymous eight women are all potential suspects in the murder of Marcel, a lecherous businessman on the verge of bankruptcy. Poor old Marcel never gets to utter a word, but it doesn’t matter because the women occupy all our attention, fighting amongst themselves, and embarking on voyages of self-discovery. Fun viewing, and a good way to spend a snowbound evening.

Trap for a Lonely Man

One of the stand-out memories of my teenage theatre-going was a trip to Chester’s Gateway Theatre to see a production of a play called Trap for a Lonely Man, involving a chap whose wife disappears and is replaced by a stranger. It proved to be an excellent thriller, with a classic final twist. Fast forward to the present, and I’ve tried to find out more about the play. It seems that it is something of a staple of provincial theatre even now, and it was written by a Frenchman, Robert Thomas.

A little more digging revealed that the play has been adapted into no fewer than four films. I haven’t seen any of them, although I’ve put in an order for Chase a Crooked Shadow, a version starring the young Richard Todd, who died recently. It also seems that Hitchcock planned to film the play, and I can well imagine that the premise would appeal to him, although he was evidently beaten to it.

The story-line is strongly reminiscent of the work of those French masters Boileau and Narcejac. I’ve mentioned before that group of writers, including Montheilhet, Arley and Valmain, who followed in the footsteps of Boileau and Narcejac, and this notable play suggests that Robert Thomas should be added to the list.

But who was Robert Thomas and what else did he write? So far, I’ve not come up with any detailed information about him, but surely he wasn’t just a one-hit wonder?