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The milieu is knowingly established as two hopefuls trudge into a music-hall agency, one specializes in comic songs and the other in "realistic" ones and there's postwar showbiz. The highlight of the Parisian revue is the lush chanteuse (Suzy Delair) wriggling to the delight of matinee crowds (Fellini evinces a vivid memory in Roma), despite all her flirtations utterly devoted to the songwriting husband (Bernard Blier) who "sees vice everywhere." (She presents herself to him in lingerie, the camera tracks in for an opulent close-up and cuts to a pan of milk boiling over on the stove.) The moneyed lecher (Charles Dullin) dangles a movie contract before the ambitious starlet and turns up dead, the smitten lesbian photographer (Simone Renant) covers up evidence, the investigation is afoot. The snap and polish suggest Henri-Georges Clouzot's familiarity with Thirties American films (and Thirties American gags, cf. the lineup of blonde suspects from Brabin's The Beast of the City), though the suspicions of Le Corbeau still churn underneath the razzmatazz surface. Louis Jouvet steps into the film's second half, and takes over. His inspector is a bag of Simenon shtick given fantastic inner life by a sardonic master—former legionnaire and servant, distilling a private acid while savoring the "sporting side" of police work, doting on the son he brought from the colonies and doffing his hat to the half-naked chorine he bumps into. Au naturel cheesecake in the studio to compete with Manet and Picasso, "so much more interesting," church bells at midnight plus a Hitchcock scream for the trickle of suicidal blood in jail. Alibis and interrogations, the old shutterbug who turns his slaughtered clan into subjects ("c'était un artiste"), nothing is lost on Clouzot, who ends with the realization that this caustic vision is, after all, a Christmas tale. With Pierre Larquey, Jeanne Fusier-Gir, Claudine Dupuis, René Blancard, and Robert Dalban. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |