The Maids

Director: Christopher Miles

1975 / 95min / 35mm

York radiates blighted sensuality and menace as one half of the titular twosome in Miles’s superb adaptation of the controversial 1947 play by renegade novelist and poet Jean Genet, loosely based on the true story of the Papin sisters, housemaids convicted of killing their employer and her daughter in 1933. Opposite York’s Claire is Glenda Jackson as the sadistic Solange, the two sinister siblings engaging in strange sadomasochistic rituals and hatching diabolical schemes in a posh Parisian townhouse, right under the nose of haughty employer Vivien Merchant.