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Quai des Orfevres (The Criterion Collection)

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The first time I saw QUAI DES ORFEVRES (Criterion), I was hooked within minutes. I saw it again with some friends, who said they didn't want to see a foreign film and have to read subtitles, but they too were riveted almost immediately.

This noirish French crime story directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot captures the feel of 1940s Paris at night -- the back alleys and smokey cabarets -- better than any film I can think of.

But more than that, it reveals the unexpected human behavior that revolves around a possessive husband, a sexy night club singer, a best girlfriend photographer, a murdered lecherous movie producer and the persistent investigation of a weary police inspector. This terrific film is full of surprises. (The title "Quai des Orfevres" is the French equivalent to England's Scotland Yard.) Highest recommended.

Clouzot, the "French Hitchcock", downplays the suspense here to make a joyfully cynical comedy in the guise of a murder mystery about Parisian show-biz lowlife. Bernard Blier plays a loser-ish musician (who looks like, in the words of one critic, "a homicidal Bob Newhart") who is crazily jealous about his hotsy-totsy wife, the night-club singer Jenny Lamour. When she threatens to hook up with millionaire Brignon (the amazingly repellent Charles Dullin), mayhem ensues. Blier and wife are aided by their neighbor, the smut photographer Dora (who has a "masculine aspect" to her, if you get my drift) but the police are called, in the person of Louis Jouvet's magnificently dour detective. The film explores the raffish milieu of low-rent entertainment of the 1940's with great style. Clouzot retains his unique combination of satire and sentiment about equivocal human nature that is also found in his other masterpieces, "The Wages of Fear", "Diabolique" and "Le Corbeau." This is a most entertaining movie.

Is it a murder mystery? Is it a police procedural? Is it a back-stage look at seedy French music halls? Quai des Orfevres is all of these, but more than anything else it's an amusing comedy of infidelity, jealousy and love, set in post-WWII Paris. It may be surprising that Henri-Georges Clouzot, the director of such grim films as Le Corbeau or such suspenseful nail-biters as Diabolique and The Wages of Fear, is the director of this one. Clouzot, however, was a shrewd film-maker. "In a murder mystery," he tells us, 'there's an element of playfulness. It's never totally realistic. In this I share Hitchcock's view, which says, 'A murder mystery is a slice of cake with raisins and candied fruit, and if you deny yourself this, you might as well film a documentary.'" Quai des Orfevres is a wonderful film, and it's no documentary.

Jenny Martineau (Suzy Delair) is an ambitious singer at music halls and supper clubs. She's a flirt, she's sees nothing too wrong with using a bit of sex as well as talent to get a contract. Her stage name is Jenny Latour. And she really loves her husband, Maurice Martineau (Bernard Blier). Martineau is something of a sad sack. He's her accompanist and arranger. He's a bit balding, a bit chubby and jealous to a fault. Then we have their neighbor, the photographer Dora Monnier (Simone Renant). She's blond, gorgeous (think of Rita Hayworth) and capable. She and Martineau have been friends since they were children together. Dora, however, is definitely not thinking just of friendship when she looks at Jenny. Then comes along Georges Brignon (Charles Dullin), a wizened, rich and dirty old man, who often has Dora take "art" photographs of his young female proteges whom he poses himself. He offers a contract for a film to Jenny, and suggests a dinner at his home to discuss the details. Jenny is more than willing. Maurice is furious and forbids it. Jenny shouts right back at him, "You're jealous of the rich! Well, I want my share of their dough. I'm all for royalty!" "You're dad was a laborer," Maurice shouts back. "So what? Under Louis XV, I'd have been Madame de Pompadour! I'd have heated up their tights!"

And after Brignon is found dead with a smashed champagne bottle next to his bleeding skull, there's Dora to try to make things safe for Jenny. But wait. Inspector Antoine gets the case. Antoine (Louis Jouvet) is a tall, tired, middle-aged bachelor with sore feet. He has seen it all. He served in "the colonies" with the Foreign Legion and returned with an adopted baby and malaria. The child is now about eight-years old and Antoine dotes on him. One of the first things Antoine discovers is not only did someone brain Brignon with a bottle, someone shot him in the heart. Who did it? Before long Jenny, Maurice and Dora all are making up alibis, lying and, at one or another point, confessing. How will Antoine discover the murderer? Will we have a chance to see some great music hall songs sung by Jenny Latour? Everything becomes clear, but only with time and Detective Antoine's persistence. We are left with many kinds of love leading to all kinds of motives, from hair-trigger jealousy to longing glances...and all played with a nice mixture of Gallic amusement.

Clouzot takes us to a Paris of seedy but not threatening neighborhoods, to downtrodden music publishers where tunes are played on the piano for buyers, to restaurants with discrete private dining rooms. Most of all, he takes us to the music hall where Jenny Latour often performs. We can see Jenny as she sings, with couples in the seats and single men wearing their coats and hats in standing room. And everyone smokes. The first third of the film, in fact, takes place largely in this milieu. With Jenny singing about "Her petite tra-la-la, her sweet tra-la-la," we follow her from trying out the song at the publishers to a rehearsal to a saucy performance with Jenny in a feathered hat, a corset, gartered stockings and not much else.

Delair, Blier and Renant all do wonderful jobs, but it Louis Jouvet who holds everything together. He was a marvelous actor who disliked making films. The stage was his world, and he took on films only if he happened to like the director and to make money to finance his stage work. Jouvet was tall with a long face and broad cheekbones. He was not conventionally handsome but he had what it takes to dominate a scene. For a look at how skillfully he could play comedy, watch him in Drole de Drame. He's a fascinating actor. At one point he says, "I've taken a liking to you, Miss Dora Monnier." "Me?" she asks. "Yes. Because you and I are two of a kind. When it comes to women, we'll never have a chance." Jouvet brings all kinds of nuances to that line, from rueful regret to a gentle amusement.

The Criterion release of Quai des Orfevres has an excellent black-and-white transfer, with deep blacks and rich grays. There is a short interview with Clouzot and another interview with Blier, Renant and Delair. The case holds a fold-out which gives film details and a solid essay about the film. Most importantly, on the other side it gives us a full-length photo of Jenny in her small and effective costume.

This work presents arguably the greatest ambiguity ever filmed.

The plot revolves around a murder but everything else is ambiguous to the viewer and even to the characters in the movie until the very end. Who killed the victim? Who will be charged with the crime? Who believes that they themself killed the victim? Who is believed by who to have killed the victim? And what does the viewer believe about all this? The answers to these questions change scene by scene, with the one constant being that these questions never have the same answer until the end of the movie.

The movie's style is equally ambiguous... Is it a noir where the sins of the lead characters appear certain to bring about their fall? Or is it a classic detective story where the relentless investigator traps the perpretator in their own lies? Is it a story of love? And if so, between who? Or one of jealousy? Ultimately it ends up as a love story because it is the many overlapping bonds of love that propel the plot, define the characters, and bring this movie to its spectacular conclusion.

So if you love noir, you MUST see this film. It is the only movie you will ever see where a single scene late in the movie changes the entire previous movie from a noir to a love story.

Quai des Orfevres takes too long getting going, with Clouzot so enamored of his back-stage milieu that he is almost in danger of forgetting the story. However, once it does, it's Clouzot at his best. Bertrand Blier (father of Bertrand Blier and co-star of his Buffet Froid) is the worldworn pianist who married beneath himself and who plans to kill the seedy studio mogul with designs on his wife only to find that someone has beaten him to it. Not only that, but his carefully planned but clumsily executed alibi falls to pieces, not least when a thief steals his car at the murder scene...

The film really kicks into life with the arrival of Luis Jouvet's police inspector, a rather wonderful creation half Alistair Sim in Green for Danger and half world-weary Maigret with better dialog. In a neat running gag, his investigation is constantly conducted at the top of his voice against chaos and noise, whether it be the noisy typewriters of the police station or a loud rehearsal. The police station itself is a wonderfully realistic creation, a wealth of chaotic and telling small details that makes Steve Bocchco's once revolutionary 80's US cop shows look like antiquated museum pieces by comparison.

If Suzy Delair is a rather unconvincing femme fatale, the supporting cast more than compensate, with the beautiful Simone Renant a standout as the lesbian photographer in love with her from afar and constantly mistaken for Blier's lover by Delair and other interested parties (only Jouvet, similarly unlucky with women, understands and genuinely sympathises). With great black and white photography by Armand Thirard, this is a terrific little thriller with a nice twist ending and a lovely scene with a cab driver reluctantly identifying Renant in a police station. (Trivia note: Pierre Larquey, who played the playfully philosophical Dr Vorzet in Le Corbeau, turns up in smaller roles as a cab-driver in both Quai and Les Espions.)

The Criterion DVD is quite superb - great picture quality plus an illuminating extract from a French TV show featuring interviews with Clouzot, Blier and Renant.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1948 police procedural, also exhibited under the title JENNY LAMOUR, is a beautifully constructed look into the lives of the lower depths of Paris just after the war, where millionaires go slumming and rub elbows with pornographers, petty thieves, and vaudeville performers. As with his later LES DIABOLIQUES, Clouzot focuses mainly on an odd little ménage á troi: Jenny Lamour (the astonishingly carnal Suzy Delair), a music-hall songstress and femme fatale; her nebbishy husband and accompanist Maurice Martineau (Bernard Blier, looking like Bob Newhart); and Dora Monier (Simone Renant), their photographer friend who dabbles in pornography and who yearns for Jenny (but sleeps with Maurice). All three of them one night secretly visit the crime scene of a murder of the loathsome elderly capitalist (Charles Dullin) who makes advances towards Jenny: the film shows you how they attempt to cover their tracks, and then how a seedy gumshoe on the Paris police force (Louis Jouvet) undoes all their work. You wind up rooting for the trio. despite their bad behaviors towards one another, because the murdered man was so despicable, yet you also understand the detective's impassioned defense of police work, even though the Paris police here abuse their suspects' civil rights and employ all kinds of questionable tactics.

A film like this depends wholly on its director and its actors, and in this regard it could not be better. Clouzot has often been compared to Hitchcock for his dark view of human relations, his interest in generating extreme suspense, and his poor treatment of his actors (though like Hitchcock he often prompted amazing performances from them). Although all four principals are terrific, it's as hard to keep your eyes off of Clouzot's Jenny, Suzy Delair, as it is for everyone around her character in the film. The French dialogue is admirably tough and coarse, which enhances the naturalistic sense of probing the Parisian lower depths.

This neatly contrived story involving murder, love, lust, a police investigation, and pleasant music hall interludes ranges in quick order across a range of genres, layering escapist entertainment, suspense, and sentiment over dramatic ironies, comic absurdities, and psychological realism that all look ahead to a style of filmmaking well suited to a postmodern sensibility. With so much going on in one film, you have to hang onto your seat as you're propelled through multiple turns of plot and a large cast of characters all converging in a final point of narrative impact - and on Christmas Eve. Sounds complicated, but this classic of post-war French cinema is great fun.

The DVD includes a discussion of the film, made for French TV in the 1970s, in which the pipe-smoking director, Clouzot, reveals among other things that he wrote the script based on his memory of an out of print book - the result apparently bearing little resemblance to the original. Included are comments by the three principals, who remember Clouzot's direction as dictatorial and heavy-handed. Meanwhile, the interviewer characterizes the film as "cynical" in its vision - hardly an observation viewers would make today. Also recommended, the classic film noir "Touchez Pas le Grisbi."

H.G. Cluozot had difficulties working in France after he had made "Le Corbeau" in 1943 which was produced by the German company and later judged by French as a piece of anti-French propaganda. Louis Jouvet, an admirer of Clouzot's work, invited him to direct a thriller "Quai des Orfevres" where he played an ambiguous police inspector investigating a murder that happened in Paris Music Hall. Without each other knowledge, the seductive cabaret singer Jenny Lamoure (Suzy Delair) and her jealous piano-accompanist husband Maurice who is madly in love with her (Bertrand Blier, father of director Bertrand Blier) trying to cover up (without each other's knowledge) what they believe to be their involvement in the murder? Enters tenacious policeman (Louis Jouvet) who is determined to discover the truth. Jouvet practically stole the movie with wonderfully cynic and sentimental in the same time performance. "His character, his eagle-like profile and his unique way of speaking made him unforgettable."
"Quai des Orfevres", witty and atmospheric observation of human weaknesses was a great comeback of H.G. Cluozot, the fine director, "French Hitchcock".

4.5/5

This smart, atmospheric policier marked Clouzot's return to filmmaking after the putatively anti-French "Le Corbeau." Blier and Delair are magnetic performers, and clearly relish their roles as a husband and wife under investigation by crafty Inspector Antoine (the marvelous Louis Jouvet), a man with a nose for human foibles. Clouzot handles the noir conventions with a deft touch, but focuses on developing his characters--including raven-haired beauty Simone Renant, playing Jenny's bosom friend and closet lesbian, Dora. (Best line: "I'm a funny kind of girl.") If you like your noir with a classy French twist, check out "Quai des Orfevres."

"Quai des Orfevres," (1947), is another black and white classic of the French cinema: an atmospheric, set in dark and gritty post-war Paris, murder mystery. It comes to us under the aegis of Henri-Georges Clouzot, who adapted the movie from a novel by Stanislas-André Steeman, wrote its dialog and directed it. Clouzot also adapted and wrote the dialogue for another black and white French classic, Le Corbeau (The Raven) - Criterion Collection (1943). He is furthermore credited with two of the greatest, most honored black and white French thrillers of all time: namely, adaptation, dialog and direction for The Wages of Fear - Criterion Collection, (1953); and scenario, dialog and direction for Diabolique (The Criterion Collection) Spine #35), (1955), both of which movies are honored worldwide. So obviously, attention must be paid to this murder mystery of his, a film I must admit I found rather odd.

In a brisk 106 minutes, Clouzot introduces us to the world of the Paris music hall as it existed in 1947, before television was to kill it, though probably no one knew it at the time. But Clouzot might have seen it coming. At any rate, cutesy, popular singer Marguerite Chauffournier Martineau, aka Jenny Lamour, (played by Suzy Delair) is a comer, building her career, but she doesn't know that she's on the brink of achieving notoriety - however, not as a performer. Instead, she gets herself embroiled in a tale of intrigue that involves her jealous husband and accompanist, Maurice (Bernard Blier), having possibly murdering a man. Also muddying the waters is their mutual, beautiful photographer friend who lives in their building, Dora Monier, played by Simone Renant. Until, in comes Insp. Antoine (Louis Jouvet) to sort it all out for you.

All four of these performers were big stars at the time in France, though Jouvet was the biggest dramatic star. Blier was most popular as a comic at the time: this was his first serious role. As Maurice Martineau, in addition to being his wife's accompanist, he was a pianist/composer, who worked as what we would have called a song plugger, in a firm that we would describe as a Tin Pan Alley shop. (The shop, Leopardi's, boasts a picture on the wall of the ever-beloved performer Maurice Chevalier, if you can catch it). Be that as it may, Maurice's wife Marguerite is quite a pretty girl, though some contemporary viewers may find her behavior unbearable; but it's easy to see why he would be jealous of her. However, the photographer Dora, who has known him since their childhood, is, for my money, rather more beautiful than his wife. But, contemporary audiences were meant to regard her sexuality as ambiguous, and perhaps they did, based upon the facts that she always seemed a little off, and wore pants. The women are beautifully dressed, in the height of postwar chic, by Jacques Fath. Director Clouzot gives us some fascinating deep-focus shots, and also finds the opportunity to haul his cameras around Paris; his three leading characters apparently live near Les Halles, Paris's great central marketplace for any foodstuffs, now long gone.

Mind you, if you are trying to follow the movie in subtitles, the clues are really sparing. You've got to pay really close attention to those subtitles - I believe only two sentences give you any clue as to what's going on.

In an interview with the director Clouzot that comes as an extra to the disk, he quotes Alfred Hitchcock, famed Anglo-American director of thrillers and mysteries (North by Northwest (50th Anniversary Edition), Vertigo (Collector's Edition)) to the effect that a murder mystery plot is just a vessel, and a good one for a movie. But that what matters is what the director uses to fill the vessel; he'd best be interested in that material, if the audience is going to be. I found the music hall background interesting, and endlessly perky Marguerite hard to take. But if you love WAGES, and DIABOLIQUES, it's worth seeing just how Clouzot fills this vessel. Oh, and by the way, Quai des Orfevres is the address of Inspector Antoine's police station, an address undoubtedly better known in its time and place.