The Infernal Trio
1974 film by Francis Girod
The Infernal Trio (French: Le Trio infernal; also known as Lady of Hell) is a 1974 crime comedy horror film directed by Francis Girod from a screenplay he co-wrote with Jacques Rouffio, based on the novel Le Trio infernal by Solange Fasquelle.
Plot
The film opens in 1920s Marseiiles. As a comically tinny municipal band plays, middle-aged lawyer Georges Sarret is presented with a military medal in a pompous ceremony. A strikingly beautiful nurse-attendant demurely wheels a rich, elderly lady to the ceremony in a bath-chair. As her eyes meet Sarret’s, lingering speculatively, she fails to notice the old lady has slipped down in the chair, dead. The beautiful attendant is Philomena Schmidt, a now unemployed German, who falls into bed with Sarret, as he arranges her wedding to an older man so she can stay in France. After the wedding, Sarret also beds her sister Catherine, and a lustful ménage a trois develops.
The trio begin a career of insurance fraud. Catherine marries an elderly man called Deltreuil, while Sarret bribes Chambon, a dubious priest, to impersonate Deltreuil at the medical exam, and the gang, now including Chambon’s mistress Noémie, pull off a very profitable insurance fraud. Sarret decides to get rid of Chambon and Noémie, whom he shoots at a villa near Aix-en-Provence rented for the purpose.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Infernal Trio” as 1974 film by Francis Girod. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1974 film by Francis Girod. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2453778. 12 of 12 selected statements include explicit references; 12 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1974.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Infernal Trio” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.