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"Right from the start," wrote the young critic in a 1955 Cahiers du Cinéma review, "Rear Window does present an immediate focus of interest that puts it on a higher plane than the majority of [Alfred Hitchcock's] earlier works, enough to warrant its entry into the category of serious films, beyond the mere entertainment thriller." The title of Claude Chabrol's essay was "Serious Things," itself an assertion that the loftiest cinematic artistry could reside in a mere thriller — either Hitchcock's or, when the critic turned director a few years later, his own.

Chabrol directed many kinds of films — breezy action-adventures, solemn adaptations of Flaubert and Simenon, true-life stories of notorious French citizens — but he was most celebrated for domestic dramas that end in murder. Some of his best films (La Femme Infidèle, Le Boucher) he wrote himself; other prime works (Les Cousins, Les Bonnes Femmes, The Beast Must Die, Une Partie de Plaisir) were scripted by Paul Gégauff. Still others were based on paperback novels by mystery writers from the U.S. (Stanley Ellin, Charlotte Armstrong, Evan Hunter as Ed McBain) and Britain (Ruth Rendell, Nicholas Blake). Call them mere thrillers, à la Hitchcock, with a sardonic Gallic accent and little chance of a climactic Hollywood resurrection. Chabrol probably wouldn't mind the label, for he was a scholar of the genre; in 1957 he and Eric Rohmer wrote the first book-length critique of Hitchcock's films, and he titled another of his Cahiers essays "The Evolution of the Thriller."

But even modes men get posthumous praise. When Chabrol died on Sept. 12 in Paris, at 80, after directing 55 feature films — from his 1958 Le Beau Serge to last year's Bellamy — and more than a dozen French TV movies and episodes, he was lionized as the founding father of that late-'50s film explosion known as the New Wave, along with such giants as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Rohmer and Alain Resnais. French President Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed him an artist in the class of Balzac and Rabelais — "a great auteur and a great filmmaker." Really, though, Chabrol might have preferred to be linked with his favorite Master of Suspense. Comparison to a great and popular movie man: that would have been enough.

The camera, author John Berger wrote, is a man looking at a woman. Hitchcock often told stories of men with a toxic focus on women (Vertigo, Psycho); so did Chabrol — like every moviegoer, he was the viewer as voyeur. A connoisseur of the sexual appraisal that men send women's way, he identified its power, sickness and high mortality rate. Looking can kill you, he suggested — unless you're a professional, like a movie director. Paris-born but sent to the provinces during the war, he came back to study pharmacology — appropriately, because this director saw all desire as a dangerous drug; he was an anatomizer of eroticism, the suave coroner of desire. When a man and a woman got together in a Chabrol movie, someone was sure to end up hurt. Often dead, like the lovely Clothilde Joano in Les Bonnes Femmes, from 1960: she's strangled in the bushes by her dream beau. Or the woman in the 1971 Just Before Nightfall: she's engaging in a fond S&M romp with her lover, who, hélas, presses just a little too hard on her neck ...

Chabrol's death — from natural causes, we hasten to add — capped more than a half-century of deadpan domestic-crime films in the medium-high range. One wouldn't call them masterpieces (though Les Bonnes Femmes and a few others come close) any more than flops. Those words need to be shouted, and Chabrol was an artist of grimaces and whispers. Like Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and some other of his copains at Cahiers, Chabrol graduated from writing about movies to writing and directing them. (The magazine's top 10 film list of 1960 included three films from its alumni — Godard's Breathless, Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player and Chabrol's Les Bonnes Femmes — and there's not a ringer in the bunch.) But unlike his friends when they stepped behind the camera, Chabrol did not pinwheel an effusive or ostentatiously vivid style. His artistic imprint fell softly on the cinematic carpet. An admirer of classic Hollywood films, he made his own in a muted visual voice with sardonic, subversive undertones.

Yet his work was as distinctive and distinguished as that of his estimable friends. The Chabrol world was a well-furnished corner of the middle class where passion led to criminal foolishness — a tendency captured in the title of his 1976 film Folies Bourgeoises. Naive young men or women would meet someone worldlier and be tested, corrupted, defiled, defeated. Chabrol adapted a Richard Neely novel, The Damned Innocents, into the 1975 film Innocents with Dirty Hands, and both titles give a hint of his attitude toward his subjects. Few of them were wholly without sin. Most of them dwelt in rancorous restlessness, sank into suave or sordid deceit, and often came to believe that a marriage could be ended by means more final and fatal than divorce.

Any career lasting a half century has its ridges and ditches, but this filmmaker's richest periods ("major Chabrol," the critics say) tended to come in spurts of a few years, followed by another few years of routine work ("minor Chabrol"). Le Beau Serge and the city-mouse, country-mouse parable Les Cousins marked a vigorous start, capped by Les Bonnes Femmes, the story of four shopgirls who are as eager for love as they are disappointed by it. The film contains comic scenes both light (a man at a swimming pool sucks in his gut when introduced to the girls, then lets it sag when a man comes by) and dark (the shop's older cashier keeps as a relic the handkerchief of a condemned murderer). Chabrol and Gégauff, whose fondness for cruel plot twists matched or exceeded his director's, send their sweetest character (Joano) toward ecstasy when she meets a suitor (Mario David) under the glittering ball above a dance hall, then end her life with a snap of the neck. The film ends with a new young woman, hopes high, attracting the gaze of a new young man under the same spinning ball. And the dance goes on.

This brilliant early period was followed by a few years of lesser films and commissioned works in the genre of James Bond imitations (Marie-Chantal vs. Dr. Kha), before Chabrol rebounded with a half-dozen features in his splendidly mordant maturity from 1968 to 1971: Les Biches, La Femme Infidèle, The Beast Must Die, Le Boucher, La Rupture and Just Before Nightfall. In these acutely observed parables of the bourgeoisie, grand and petit, jealousy could spiral into tragedy, but without a saving catharsis; Chabrol always avoided the crashing of symbols. Another jagged peak in the '70s was his final work with Gégauff: Une Partie de Plaisir, the writer's semi-autobiographical version of the breakup of his marriage, starring himself as himself, more or less, and his ex-wife as his ex-wife. It's the squirmiest amalgam of self-criticism, hate letter and proto-reality TV.

He went "minor" again for the next decade or so, except for his collaborations with Isabelle Huppert on true-life crime films: Violette, with the star as a young woman convicted for killing her father, and Story of Women, in which Huppert is on trial as a Vichy-era abortionist. Huppert, whose cool sexual calculation could always elevate her director's game: the 1995 La Cérémonie and Merci pour le Chocolat, which ushered Chabrol into the new millennium in high style. Their last collaboration, the 2006 Comedy of Power, provided the two with a fresco of sexual and political corruption so vast it just had to be true: the Elf Acquitaine scandal, involving a multibillion-franc slush fund for bribes, mistresses and other skulduggery that the righteous judge played by Huppert is determined to uncover. The opening statement — "Any resemblance to persons living or dead is, as they say, coincidental" — is among the drollest in Chabrol's oeuvre.

Other Cahiers directors ornamented their films with top French stars; not so Chabrol, who used Jean-Paul Belmondo in only one of his first pictures (A Double Tour), Gerard Depardieu only at the end (Bellamy), and Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve not at all. He wanted actors who could be mistaken for the fellow next door, the hostess of a suburban soiree. Michel Bouquet, with his slim lips perennially pressed into regret, was the Chabrol hero-victim in La Femme Infidèle, La Rupture and Just Before Nightfall. (It's a mark of the difference between French and American films that, when La Femme Infidèle was remade in 2002 as Unfaithful, Bouquet's homme ordinaire was played by Hollywood hunk Richard Gere.) Jean Yanne, whose brooding surliness could be counted on to ejaculate into rage, was a superb brute in Le Boucher and The Beast Must Die. No question that Huppert was a star of uncommon intelligence and threat; but then, Chabrol had helped make her one. His leading actress in seven films spanning nearly three decades, she was his enduring cinema spouse.

Chabrol's own three marriages, though less melodramatic than those in his films, offered clues to his career. At 25 he married Agnès Goute, whose family had a little money; like Truffaut, Chabrol used his wife's inheritance to finance his first feature. He divorced Goute in 1962 and, two years later, married actress Stéphane Audran, whose dominating sexual hauteur would illuminate a couple dozen of his films; she was Huppert with a slightly higher temperature. His third wife, Aurore Paquiss, went from movie ingenue to script supervisor. Financier, star actress, on-the-set helpmate: a director's three indispensible aides. And when Chabrol wasn't marrying collaborators, he sired them. His son Matthieu (by Goute) composed the scores for many of Papa's films; son Thomas (by Audran) acted in a dozen Chabrol films; son Jean-Berthieu worked in the sound department; and Paquiss's daughter Cécile was a second-unit director. By the end, a Chabrol film was a family business.

One of the wonders of the Cahiers wunderkinders is that they started with a bang and stayed at it for so long. Truffaut died early, at 52 in 1984. But Rohmer lasted until early this year, succumbing a few months short of his 80th birthday. And Godard, now 80, Rivette, 82, and Resnais, 89, are still making important, charming or infuriating films, just as they should. (One thing about the French: they don't desert their old masters.) But none of these greats had a career as placidly productive as Chabrol's, or as dedicated to making "serious things" the stuff of wickedly entertaining art.

• Richard Corliss
• Chabrol directed many kinds of films but he was most celebrated for domestic dramas that end in murder