In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese.

DIRECTED BY CLAUDE CHABROL (December 10, 8pm)--Claude Chabrol made his first film in 1958 and his last in 2009, a year before his death at the age of 80. So, in a career spanning 51 years, he made 51 features, 3 shorts, multiple episodes and mini-series for television, and one non-fiction film. That's astonishing in and of itself--I don't know of another filmmaker outside of the American studio system with such an enormous body of work. Not all of the films are great, which Chabrol himself admitted. In the '60s, he directed a couple of pictures about a secret agent named Tiger in the tradition of Modesty Blaise, Our Man Flint and the television series The Man from UNCLE, all of which were made in the wake of the James Bond pictures. Chabrol himself actually thought these films were worthless: "I really wanted to get to the full extent of the drivel," he said. Chabrol believed in keeping his hand in even when his heart wasn't in it, as they used to say. In this sense he was quite different from his contemporaries in the French New Wave. Like Godard and Truffaut and Rivette and Rohmer, he started as a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma (he and Rohmer wrote the first book on Hitchcock, in the '50s), and he was the first among them to complete a feature--Le Beau Serge, made independently in 1958, which will be shown on TCM as part of a little tribute to Chabrol on December 10. Hitchcock comes up a lot in most discussions of Chabrol (or at least he used to), as he does with Brian De Palma, but in Chabrol's case it's a little misleading. I don't really think of his films as thrillers as much as close studies of the French upper middle class, of the craziness you can find in the world of the rich. Some of the films--for instance, Masques (1985), which is part of this tribute--veer in the direction of comedy; some, Le Beau Serge or Les Cousins (1959) or A Story of Women (1988), set during the occupation, are moodier, more somber. Others, like La Cérémonie, walk the line, expertly, between the comic and the tragic. It's an extraordinary picture, with Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire as two maids who slaughter the family they work for (the film is adapted from a Ruth Rendell novel, but it's also based on the true story of Christine and Léa Papin, who murdered their employers in Le Mans in 1933, also the inspiration for Jean Genet's The Maids). The picture shifts gears about as deftly as I can imagine, and it also remains coolly observant, almost detached throughout--only someone with an absolute mastery of their craft could make a film like La Cérémonie. As I said, Chabrol made many films, and several of his greatest, including Les Bonnes femmes, La Femme infidèle (remade about a decade ago by Adrian Lyne as Unfaithful), and Le Boucher, aren't included in this little sampling. Since we're talking about Chabrol, who was a great gourmet, let's say that these five pictures together make for a good starter course.

by Martin Scorsese