This is especially apparent in Les Biches (1968), La Femme infidèle (1969), and Le Boucher (1970) – all featuring Stéphane Audran, who was his wife at the time.

James Monaco has called Chabrol "the craftsman par excellence of the New Wave, and his variations upon a theme give us an understanding of the explicitness and precision of the language of the film that we don't get from the more varied experiments in genre of Truffaut or Godard.

After World War II, Chabrol moved to Paris to study pharmacology[3] and literature at the Sorbonne, where he received a licence en lettres.

[2] While living in Paris Chabrol became involved with the postwar cine club culture and frequented Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française and the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and other future Cahiers du Cinéma journalists and French New Wave filmmakers.

[4] After he was discharged from the army, he joined his friends as a staff writer for Cahiers du Cinéma, who were challenging then-contemporary French films and championing the concept of Auteur theory.

As a film critic, Chabrol advocated realism both morally and aesthetically, mise-en-scene, and deep focus cinematography, which he wrote "brings the spectator in closer with the image" and encourages "both a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his part to the action in progress.

[2] Chabrol had said that Rohmer deserves the majority of the credit for the book, while he mainly worked on the sections pertaining to Hitchcock's early American films, Rebecca, Notorious, and Stage Fright.

In the mid-sixties it was difficult for Chabrol to obtain financing for films so he made a series of commercial "potboilers" and spy spoofs, which none of the other New Wave filmmakers did.

Critics noticed similarities to Hitchcock's films, such as the motifs of doubling and re-occurrences and the "Catholic guilt transference" that Chabrol had also written about extensively in his and Rohmer's book the year earlier.

[10] More so than his first film, Les Cousins features many characteristics that would be seen as "Chabrolian", including the Hitchcock influence, a depiction of the French bourgeoisie, characters with ambiguous motives and a murder.

Les Cousins was another box office success in France and won the Golden Bear at the 9th Berlin International Film Festival.

After the success of Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, Chabrol began funding many of the films of his friends.

[2] He also donated excess film stock from Les Cousins to Rivette to complete Paris nous appartient.

[8] Chabrol was also a technical advisor on Jean-Luc Godard's feature debut Breathless and acted in small parts in many of his friends' and his own early films.

[2] After two box office hits in a row, Chabrol was given a big budget to make his first color film, À double tour (Léda) in the spring of 1959.

Chabrol adapted the script with Paul Gégauff from a novel by Stanley Ellin, and the film is known for its oedipal sex triangle and murder scenario.

The film stars Bernadette Lafont, Clotilde Joano, Stéphane Audran and Lucile Saint-Simon as four Parisian appliance store employees who all dream of an escape from their mediocre lives, and the different outcomes for each girl.

However some left-wing critics disliked Chabrol's depiction of working-class people and accused him of making fun of their lifestyles.

Later that year he had a minor hit film with Landru, written by Françoise Sagan and starring Charles Denner, Michèle Morgan, Danielle Darrieux and Hildegard Knef.

[2] From 1964 to 1967 Chabrol made six films and one short that were critically and commercially disastrous, and this period is considered a low point of his career.

Chabrol co-starred with Stéphane Audran as a middle aged couple dealing with their rebellious teenage daughter.

[13] Chabrol often worked with the same people during this period including actors Audran and Michel Bouquet, cinematographer Jean Rabier, editor Jacques Gaillard, sound technician Guy Chichignoud, composer Pierre Jansen, set designer Guy Littaye, as well as producer Génovés and co-writer Paul Gégauff.

Yanne plays Popaul, a former war hero known for his violent behavior, much like that depicted in the prehistoric cave drawings that the characters look at in their Périgord community.

The film stars Michel Bouquet as an ad executive named Charles who kills his mistress but cannot handle the guilt, so he confesses his crime to her husband (François Périer) and his wife (Stéphane Audran), expecting their condemnation.

To their surprise the President of France orders that no investigation be made of the mayor's death, leading the murdering couple to suspect political interest in their crime.

[2] In the spring of 1973 the French government banned the film for one month, allegedly so that it would not influence members of the jury of a controversial criminal trial.

[15] Chabrol followed this political theme with Nada, in which a group of young anarchists kidnap an American ambassador.

The film starred a young Isabelle Huppert as a real life Parisian girl from a respectable petit-bourgeois family in the 1930s.

At night Violette sneaks out to pick up men and eventually contracts syphilis, which she convinces her parents must be hereditary before she kills them.