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The credits roll over darkness briefly illuminated by a blowtorch, from the start a vision ténébreuse. A circular pan at drizzly dawn sketches the tiny villa by the side of the road, two or three houses plus a gas station, inside the garage is the Dutch diamond merchant with a bullet in his face (cf. Foreign Correspondent). Blaming outsiders is the custom, the Dane with the metallic eyepatch (Georges Koudria) gets the third degree until Inspector Maigret (Pierre Renoir) takes over the case. The zonked-out nymph (Winna Winifried), the mechanic squeezing his accordion (André Dignimont), Pigalle toughs who've seen too many American gangster movies, suspects scuttling in and out of shadows. "Who was that?" "Oh, just an odd character." Jean Renoir on Georges Simenon, or rather between Vampyr and The Big Sleep, "his most mysterious film" (Godard). Its murkiness has been attributed to missing reels, and yet what better way to show how the flow of human strangeness cannot be contained by policier genre rules? A catalog of feints, the beer bottle full of poison and the cocaine stash in the spare tire, a baleful soundscape of backfiring autos and gun blasts. A car chase filmed at midnight as a barreling POV tracking shot, the skulking doctor in his top hat and gloves out of Universal horror, the kind of invention mistaken for clumsiness by drab reviewers. Renoir's Maigret has the proper drooping eye and falcon profile, though the beguiling wild card is Winifried's indolent femme fatale, flashing her thighs and using her halting accent to stretch out every provocative taunt. "If every police officer in France were like you, I'd turn criminal, too." With Jean Gehret, Georges Térof, Jane Pierson, Michel Duran, Jean Mitry, Max Dalban, and Roger Gaillard. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |