Ten Days' Wonder (1972) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

Ten Days' Wonder is a mystery film from "the French Hitchcock", Claude Chabrol.

It begins with Norman Bates, an aspiring sculptor, waking up in a Paris hotel room with blood on his hands and no memory of the previous four days. Desperate for help, he calls his old university philosophy professor and asks him to lend an analytical eye to his life, to help him determine if he is a killer, or insane, or both, or neither.

The professor accepts an invitation to the lavish country estate where Norman grew up. Norman's dad (Orson Welles) is approximately the richest man on the planet, and during his years in the French countryside, he chose to alleviate his loneliness by raising two orphan children whom he found. Orson raised the children together as brother and sister, then adopted the orphan boy as his son, and the orphan girl as  ... his wife. Thus was the little girl suddenly promoted from Norman's sibling to his stepmother.

Norman Bates has already confessed to the professor that he has had an ongoing affair with his stepsister/stepmother, and that he is being blackmailed by a mysterious stranger who will tell ol' Orson about the affair unless he gets some substantial sums in cash. Norman is afraid that if Orson finds out about the affair, he will take drastic action against the lovers, and this might even include serving wine before its time.

The professor doesn't really care if all these people kill and swindle each other but, as a Frenchman, he can't allow the wine desecration, so he agrees to attempt to piece together the mystery during his time at the estate, trying to determine the mystery of the bloody hands as well as the identity of the blackmailer.

Essentially, the film is a four character stage play based upon an Ellery Queen story. Ellery Queen is the pseudonym of two New York authors (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, for you trivia buffs) whose mysteries became the basis of many movies and TV series. Unfortunately, instead of playing out like a mystery, this story unravels as a Greek Tragedy with Orson as Zeus and his "children" taking up various mythological themes. (For example, there is the obvious Oedipus/Electra element, and the symbol of Orson's head on the statue of Jupiter which Norman Bates is carving and eventually destroys.)

Ol' Norman acts stranger in this film than in he did Psycho or Crimes of Passion, and he wears one of the strangest wardrobes ever conceived. According to one of Orson's pompous speeches, they all seek to remain permanently frozen in 1928, so Norman runs around in his best Gatsby clothing. More accurately, he dressed as Gatsby would have dressed if he had been a flaming queen. Welles himself wears those same plus-sized bow ties that he would later seem to wear on every talk show in America, as if he truly just stepped out of his Paul Masson commercials. For some inexplicable reason, Welles wore a false nose even though he was, in all other respects, simply just being Orson Welles. I can't fathom why he did that, since it was not very different from his own nose, but the truly uncomfortable part of it is that the nose was green (left)!

Director Claude Chabrol has a great reputation, but whatever talent he had was rarely on display in this film. The atmosphere is drab, the pacing glacial, and a sense of smooth narrative is completely missing. It's such a dull movie that my mind kept wandering, and I had to go back over scenes to pick up on missing details. There are three or four sudden plot twists during the denouement and explanation of the mystery, and that solution was actually fairly clever, but in order to get to that point in the film, you'd really have to want to. What little forward movement the film has is weighted down with the slow pace and gravitas of classical drama, incredibly slow and breathy line recitations by Orson, heavy-handed symbolism, Biblical allusions, and pretentious pseudo-psychology.