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Summary
Jenny Lamour is a talented music hall singer who is determined to advance her career.
She agrees to a liaison with the businessman Brignon, who has a reputation as a dirty
old man. When he finds out, Jenny’s husband, Maurice threatens to kill Brignon.
When he discovers that Jenny has kept her promise to see Brignon, Maurice sets out to
kill the businessman - but when he arrives at his room, Brignon has already been murdered.
Realising that he is the obvious suspect, Maurice flees and tries to arrange an alibi.
However, he soon comes up against Inspector Antoine, one of the most astute detectives
in the French police service...
Review
After his three year suspension following the storm that his earlier film, Le Corbeau
, unleashed, Clouzot returned to French cinema with a magnificently crafted detective
thriller, Quai des Orfèvres. Strong characterisation, tight plotting
and moody photography are the strongest traits in Clouzot’s cinema, and this film exemplifies
this perfectly.
Although the central plot is relatively mundane - an innocent man finds himself accused
of the murder he had intended to commit - it is brought to life by some brilliant film
work and fine acting.
The film's setting is split between the glamorous world of the French music hall and the
drudgery of ordinary domestic life - a dichotomy which reinforces the sense of optimism
and pessimism which are so vividly captured.
Through Jenny Lamour, we catch more than a glimpse of 1940s music hall - which for many
was the only form of entertainment on offer at time of great penury. But her vivacity
hides an insecurity which compels her to rely on lecherous old men to advance her career.
This provides plenty of food for her husband’s paranoia, making his motives for wanting
to kill Brignon perfectly clear. And then, when it all goes wrong, Maurice himself
becomes the victim, taunted by a seemingly malicious and corrupt police inspector.
But nothing is quite what it seems - and this is where Clouzot’s skill as a director pays
dividends.
Most directors of detective thrillers focus exclusively on the plot, often to the extent
that the characters are reduced to mere instruments in carrying out that plot. Clouzot's
approach is radically different - his characters are the plot, and their inner
thoughts, their aspirations, their anxieties are essential in achieving the effect the
director is striving for. The most extreme examples of this are in Clouzot's subsequent
masterpieces of suspense, La salaire de la peur (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955).
It is a unique approach to the genre which easily earns Clouzot a place beside such giants
as Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston.
© James Travers 2000
Essay
Grim, dark and utterly ambiguous, Quai des orfèvres (literally, Goldsmiths'
Wharf) has had my mind in its grip--my heart slipped out somewhere along the way--since
I saw it for the first time yesterday afternoon. Distributed by Rialto Pictures, which
has similarly restored and recently unveiled Julien Duvivier's Pépé le
Moko (1936) and Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955), this postwar film noir is as
strange a film as I have seen.
It seems to exist on two parallel planes that in fact, however physically impossible this
may be, stunningly converge. The point of convergence is the moral murkiness of self-sacrifice,
selflessness, and pure love. On one level, we watch a number of characters whose actions
are motivated by love. However, love here is often activated by guilt, for the basis of
most of the loving acts we witness in the film is greed, career ambition, sexual jealousy--not
uplifting behavior. Thus another level compels us to question whatever altruism we may
glimpse. Indeed, the seedy, vicious environment in which the action unfolds comes to us
first, the "loving" acts after, and these acts are never allowed by the filmmaker to transcend
the environment.
The filmmaker is Henri-Georges Clouzot, who with Jean Ferry adapted Stanislas-André
Steeman's novel Légitime Défense. Clouzot was named best director at Venice
for this coldly captivating piece of work. My imagination prods me to believe something
about Clouzot's Quai des orfèvres. The film's dim music hall, one of so
many elements that invokes Alfred Hitchcock in his prewar British period, perhaps suggests
an entertainment venue closer to Clouzot's--can we use this word with reference to Clouzot?--heart:
cinema.
Is it possible that the film is somehow about the nearly blacklisted Clouzot, about the
burden he bore because countrymen of his identified him with the Germans who had occupied
France and with whom he had to deal since it was they--the Germans--who controlled the
French film industry during the war? (The principal bone of contention was his 1943 film
Le corbeau, whose stinging portrait of provincial French life many viewed as traitorous.)
Isn't it possible that Clouzot, retaliating against assaults on his loyalty, is questioning
the altruism of his attackers? So much of the film's ambiguity, at least to me, seems
to derive from the kind of complexity of circumstance and motivation that Clouzot may
have felt that others were self-righteously ignoring, even denying, in their attempts
to tidy up the national past at his (and others') expense. (In Italy, Rossellini's Rome,
Open City protected his national reputation, post-Fascism, from his previous service
to Mussolini's state, which controlled the film industry. One cannot develop one's craft
without practicing it, and Clouzot and Rossellini thus found themselves in a virtual bind.)
The main character in Quai des orfèvres, at least in the first half, comes
equipped with a stage name, Jenny Lamour (in a flamboyant performance, Suzy Delair--an
emotionally riotous, larger-than-life version of Simone Simon). Jenny, who sings, is ambitious;
she fancies herself Edith Piaf. Certainly there is hanging about the plot two persons
who involved themselves in Piaf's early career: the pimp who, failing to impress Piaf
into his stable of workers, nevertheless continued to exert influence on her career somewhere
between harassment and blackmail; and club owner Louis Leplée, whose 1936 murder
left the singer an actual suspect. However, whereas Piaf emerged a hero of the French
Resistance, Jenny Lamour seems incredibly selfish in her career-mindedness--more hawk
than sparrow. Despite husband Maurice Martineau's protestations, she pursues the attentions
of Brignon, a licentious industrialist who can advance her career. (Bertrand Blier is
splendid as the sadsack spouse; Charles Dullin, the soul of soullessness as Brignon.)
Brignon ends up dead in his home. Jenny, who cracked a champagne bottle over his head
to stave off predatory advances, assumes she is his killer. In jealous pursuit of the
man he (wrongly) believes has been cuckolding him (Jenny has been too focused on career
to be unfaithful), Maurice, packing a pistol, stumbles across the corpse and also believes
that his wife is the killer, especially once the couple's friend Dora, believing it from
what Jenny told her, adds conviction to the suspicion.
Dora has done more than that; she has entered the crime scene in order to retrieve evidence
that Jenny left behind (a tacky fox fur-in one piece of clothing, the confusion of stage
life and real life) and to wipe things of Jenny's fingerprints. She has completely escaped
the radar of Maurice's jealousy, but she is in love with Jenny, and the image of her triumphant
in the bustling city street at night, her shoulders resourcefully wrapped by Jenny's fur
piece, constitutes one of cinema's most extraordinary instances of sexual sublimation.
(Simone Renant brings a glimmer of tragedy to Dora; it's as close as the film comes to
a sympathetic adult characterization.) Maurice is eventually arrested for the murder by
the police, but Jenny also is vulnerable to official suspicion; to spare her arrest and
imprisonment, Maurice attempts suicide to certify his guilt. He doesn't succeed, but his
action here brings his wife devotedly to his side. (If Clouzot's film looks back to Hitchcock,
it looks ahead to Chabrol, whose La femme infidèle and Le boucher
(both 1969) seem in particular descendants.)
The film ends with the revelation of the real killer's identity--a passer-by. All's well
that ends well, except that Maurice and Jenny's marriage, continuing to lack foundation,
is (for the moment happily) held together by the glue of guilt and tawdry, indeed blaspheming
self-sacrifice. Like John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and so many noirs,
Clouzot's film is a film of blackness and of night--not the night of romance, even though
the scene is set in Paris, but a night of horror and entrapment. (The superb black-and-white
cinematographer is Clouzot's other eye, Armand Thirard, who would also contribute to,
among other Clouzot films, Manon (1948), The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les
diaboliques (1954).) It isn't the cobweb of fate, however, that entraps these souls
but their own lies, and more lies, to the police, without which the murder might have
been solved much sooner. (Alas, the resultant attenuated nature of the film was something
of a chore for me to navigate--since it is expressive, a "blemish" that may indeed fade
and disappear over the course of future viewings.) These lies resonate with soaring self-sacrificial
love and such shabbiness, and the shabbiness redefines the love, trapping it in a barred
prison.
One of the film's most potent images finds Maurice bucking the tide of pedestrian traffic
as, in tandem with people leaving the music hall after an evening's entertainment, he
tries to return there in order to establish an alibi after coming from the dead man's
apartment. In a panic, he has put himself into this nearly impossible physical situation;
amazingly he prevails by getting through, but the alibi wobbles indoors as one of the
performers, a magician, is surprised to discover the disaster he, the magician, experienced
onstage that night--a detail he will innocently relay to the police. Maurice's own
magic is bankrupt because he will be telling lie upon lie upon lie; and when you consider
that his motive for all this may be as much the façade of his marriage as his love
for his wife, virtue again seems to dissolve into shabbiness, seediness and vice.
The film ends on Christmas, and the irony stings; it isn't that we haven't seen Christian
acts throughout, for we have, but the pitilessly analytical examination of them that Clouzot
has provided throws into question those Christian acts. An oversized Christmas tree in
the Martineaus' apartment seems to suck the life out of the air and surely cramps the
space, creating another image of entrapment.
The second half of the film is dominated by another character entirely: Inspector Antoine,
who is the lead police investigator on the Brignon case. Weary though confident, Antoine
seems to be fueled by carbon dioxide instead of oxygen; he is inseparable from the seediness
of the environment, and he is in fact, rather than a crime-solving hero, perhaps the most
ambiguous character of all in the film. (Louis Jouvet is brilliant in this role.) It's
an elusive thing, hard to describe, but the oddly passive, somehow inverted nature of
the man makes him almost an accomplice to the lies those he interrogates tell. (Like Pharaon
De Winter, the police investigator in Bruno Dumont's 1999 Humanité, one
can almost imagine that Antoine himself is the killer.)
Apart from his work, which involving homicide is of course in itself unsettling, disturbing,
his seems almost to be a secret life, something suspiciously kept from public view. Like
Dora, he seems to be an intensely lonely individual, although he has a school-age son,
in his beret the perfect image of a little French boy. The boy is black--". . . all I
have left from my time in the colonies," Antoine explains. But the boy is very dark-skinned,
and it's possible that Antoine has adopted the boy off the street. Theirs is a loving
relationship, and indeed the film ends with father and son in a public embrace after the
latter pelts the former with a snowball outside the Martineaus' window.
Why bother with a misgiving then? (The absurd swell of music would seem to cut off ambiguity.)
Well, there's the nature of the rest of the film, with lie on top of lie hiding not only
actions but motivation. Moreover, the interplay between this parent and offspring involves
much of the same self-sacrificial nonsense that underpins other activities in the film.
The boy is home from boarding school; he has just failed his mathematics test, so he won't
be returning to school; it is math that he and his father had been concentrating on, so
the suggestion subtly arises that the boy failed the exam deliberately so that he might
rejoin his father, and his father somehow seems accomplice to this pint-sized deception.
Combine this with the predatory nature of Brignon, and with something else besides, and
a phantom suggestion takes elusive shape. The "something else" is a fleeting shot early
on of two overripely buttocked boys in clinging shorts--a very brief kind of attention
that will come rather to the full with images of the boys at the boarding school in Les
diaboliques. One can accept Antoine, surely, as a doting and devoted father; but pedophilia
isn't out of the question. It certainly would be of a piece with the environment that
Clouzot's film as a whole portrays.
In conclusion, I feel that Clouzot intended to prick virtue's façade to sound out
whatever rottenness lay behind it. My guess that this had something to do with the "virtue"
he felt was arrayed against him is just that: A guess. But it makes for a sad and haunting
fit.
© Dennis Grunes 2003
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