The “Unseen” Maigrets on DVD

The rise of the DVD has been the best thing to happen to Australian movie buffs since the development of special film collections at the National Library. Innovative theatrical exhibition may be rare, but increasingly restorations of “lost” films are being saved to DVD; and for the first time in the history of the medium scholars can research a particular film-maker the way you would a novelist—buy copies of their work, visit the libraries and write up your findings.

There are still problems. Not every DVD title can be dispatched internationally. So if you don’t have friends in the USA or Britain who can re-post items to Australia you can be frustrated. Then if you are, like me, fascinated by French cinema but a victim of New South Wales Department of Education language teaching where grammar was emphasised instead of conversational French, there is the problem of getting subtitled prints. French Amazon is willing to send you all sorts of films, but few have sous titres. This is all the more frustrating because unsubtitled versions of some splendid films in which one of my favourite actors, Jean Gabin, appeared in the 1950s and 1960s directed by the likes of Julian Duvivier and Giles Grangier, have been posted on YouTube.

I mention this because most of the films I’m going to discuss are difficult to obtain in subtitled prints. The situation is far from hopeless. French Amazon already translates its descriptions into English, which seems at least promising, and important works such as H.G. Clouzot’s Le Corbeau have been restored and reproduced on DVD with excellent subtitles. 

One film that has been for years virtually unobtainable for Australians is La Nuit du Carrefour (Night at the Crossroads), first released in 1932. To the best of my knowledge the only theatrical showing here was in the 1970s at the Australian Film Institute. Reportedly it was of an unsubtitled print, with David Stratton reading a translation of the script. Having to rely on descriptions of such a work in standard references leaves a serious gap in any serious film scholar’s viewing.

La Nuit du Carrefour was the first film adaptation of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels and was directed by the great Jean Renoir. DVDs of the film were until recently available from French Amazon but minus subtitles. Finally I located one with English titles at US Amazon. However, the distributor didn’t dispatch internationally. Fortunately I had a friend in America who forwarded the package to me.

So was it worth all the trouble? Absolutely—La Nuit du Carrefour may not be a lost masterpiece, and is based on a very early Simenon, but it is fascinating for anyone interested in detective fiction on the screen or early sound film. According to Simenon, Inspector Maigret began with an attitude and the pipe-smoking. Other character traits emerged as the series developed; or at least that is how Simenon described it to the detective in the very funny Maigret’s Memoirs published in 1950. In the original, available in English as Maigret at the Crossroads, the character is cooler and more detached than in his later incarnations. He has the pipe and overcoat but is far more active physically than he is in the later novels. All this is captured beautifully by one of the finest actors of the era, the director’s brother Pierre Renoir, in what Simenon always insisted was one of the best screen Maigrets.

The novel is in some ways untypical of the series, which tended to concentrate on psychological puzzles. Here the detective is confronted by the same kind of enigmatic woman who had just appeared in the Dashiell Hammett thrillers. She reclines on a sofa in a black velvet dress and exposes her breasts to the somewhat bemused Maigret, revealing a telltale scar that turns out to be a bullet wound. Together with her equally exotic brother, who has an opaque monocle screwed into his eye, they occupy a decaying mansion that seems to have strayed out of a gothic novel. A series of murders are committed at a crossroads beside two houses and a garage, a setting that is completely realistic. Simenon buffs even claim to have discovered the actual crossroads.

Jean Renoir responds to both the novel’s exoticism and the realism. Winna Winifred makes an effective femme fatale while Pierre Renoir recreates the sensual intimacy and mistrust described in the novel. (Madame Maigret was yet to appear in the series as a major character.) The darkly shadowed house was recreated in a real dwelling and everything looks suitably mysterious.

For the crossroads Renoir took his sound cameras, which at the time would have been rather primitive, on location and shot night-for-night, portraying the vehicles passing the garage in sound, much of which seems to have been recorded live, with pinpoints of light from the headlights piercing the darkness. Renoir was pushing his technology to the limit; but after the silent era, audiences in the early thirties relished “real” sound and Renoir gives them a feast. Not all the dialogue was intelligible, even to the original viewers. Still it somehow adds to the mystery.

The overall gloom was not a product of expressionist studio lighting or day-for-night shooting where the illusion of darkness was created with filters. Rather the darkness is only too real. A gunshot is an explosion and a flash of light, Maigret’s face is illuminated by the match he uses to light his pipe—for these shots I suspect a small spot was used—but otherwise it appears to have been done at night with available light. What’s more, performances are uniformly excellent, with none of the overplaying found in so many American films of the period.

For a film historian it is La Nuit du Carrefour’s place in Jean Renoir’s evolution as an auteur that is vital. Renoir was at the beginning of a career which was to include a series of masterpieces that made him a giant of world cinema. The realism of his only Maigret film anticipates works like La Grande Illusion and La Bête Humaine, while the theatricality of the scenes with the mysterious woman prefigure the theme of theatre and life that is to dominate his later work. 

The following year, 1933, there was another Maigret film, directed this time by Julien Duvivier with Harry Baur as the inspector. It was based on Simenon’s La Tête d’un Homme, later published in English as A Battle of Nerves. It combines a plot device that anticipates Patricia Highsmith’s novel and the Alfred Hitchcock film Strangers on a Train, plus Simenon’s recurring theme of a miscarriage of justice. At the moment seeing this film version is almost impossible. It was released on VHS in French only, but this has since been withdrawn. Some years ago my friend and colleague, the director and film scholar Barrie Patterson, showed me this tape and provided a running translation. I recall it as a taut thriller with Harry Baur making an authoritative Maigret. However, much as he admired the actor, Simenon felt Baur was a little too old for the character. Nevertheless this is an important film. Duvivier is now recognised as one of the great directors of the 1930s and this is a seminal work.

Reportedly less distinguished were the three Maigret films made during the Occupation: Picpus (1943), Cecile est Morte (1944) and Les Caves du Majestic (1945). They starred the very handsome matinee idol Albert Préjean as Maigret with his faithful subordinate Lucas played as comic relief. Somehow the Nazi-backed Continental Films had acquired the rights to the novels, which caused Georges Simenon some embarrassment after the war—he had also been targeted as a Jew by the Germans. It doesn’t need a Maigret to deduce the outlines of the ugly blackmail the Nazis employed to compromise the famous writer. There was little sympathy in postwar France for these dilemmas and as a result Simenon spent most of the late 1940s in the USA.

At present the films themselves are available on DVD from French Amazon but without subtitles. This is a pity because the story of film-making in this period, particularly at Continental, is endlessly fascinating. It has even been the subject of a splendid film, Laissez Passer (Safe Conduct), by Bertrand Tavernier. Moreover, Cecile est Morte was directed by Maurice Tourneur, one of the great silent directors. 

Not surprisingly in the circumstances, the next Simenon adaptation in 1949 was an American production. It was a remake of La Tête d’un Homme. The book had been translated into English in 1940 (Angus & Robertson published a one-volume edition here combining A Battle of Nerves with A Face for a Clue titled The Patience of Maigret). Irwin Allen decided to shoot this new version, titled The Man on the Eiffel Tower, in Paris using the new Ansco colour process. Films like Call Northside 777 (1948) had made extensive use of Chicago locations and, most famously, The Naked City (1948) had been shot entirely in New York City.

No one even considered using colour for these earlier films, partly because it would have been unsuitable for their rather dark subject matter, and in 1948 35mm Technicolor cameras were far too cumbersome. Cameramen of the period found Ansco colour a liberation. Ace cinematographer Stanley Cortez was able to mount two cameras on a platform for the climactic chase on the Eiffel Tower, and location photography in 1940s Paris became relatively easy. However, the new colour process was one of the reasons the film was nearly lost. Ansco colour was a reversal stock, which meant there was no negative. You simply printed off the original. According to titles on the DVD the restoration was based on the only two surviving 35mm nitrate prints. The images are rather muted compared to the sparkling print I saw as a boy at the Kings Theatre Chatswood over sixty years ago.

The whole idea of shooting a kind of colour travelogue of Paris to accompany Harry Brown’s adaptation of Simenon’s dark thriller was a bad one from the start. Certainly the characters in the novel wander all over Paris, but Simenon’s vision is bleak and disenchanted, and the main action is not helped by staging every chase near a famous landmark. Nevertheless Charles Laughton as Maigret, Franchot Tone, cast against type as a cunning murderer, and Burgess Meredith playing the man he has framed, are all very good. After two days shooting Laughton threatened to quit if Burgess Meredith didn’t take over the direction. Given that Laughton in his time had worked with some famously difficult directors, Allen must have been terribly inept and indeed never directed again. Although some of the blocking within the frame is at times awkward, Burgess directs the “battle of nerves” between Laughton’s Maigret and Tone’s psychopath with great skill.

Even though Simenon found it strange to see his creation speaking English, Laughton faithfully recreates the externals described in the early novels. There is the bristly moustache, sometimes the overcoat, a black homburg standing in for the famous bowler and, of course, the pipe. Laughton also captures the humanity. Behind all the mannerisms we are always aware Maigret is desperately worried that the wrong man will be executed.

Although The Man on the Eiffel Tower is deeply flawed it remains fascinating. The chase up the tower may be preposterous but it is spine chilling for anyone who has a fear of heights; and, as one would expect with Stanley Cortez, the sequence is superbly photographed. The restoration on DVD is as good as could be expected in the circumstances and illustrates why preservation programs should cast as wide a net as possible. In this case fine work by three distinguished actors has been rescued as well as significant evidence about the history of colour film.

There was an interesting sequel to Laughton and Cortez’s collaboration on the film. Three years later they worked together on Abbott and Costello meet Captain Kidd (1952), cementing the friendship begun on The Man on the Eiffel Tower. They then formed one the most significant director–cinematographer collaborations in American film history when they worked on Night of the Hunter (1955). Not a success at the time, the film is now recognised as a masterpiece, with some extraordinary visuals for which Cortez insisted Laughton was as responsible as the cinematographer. 

The French film industry did not wait long to reclaim their most famous detective. In 1955 Georges Simenon published Maigret Tend un Piège (Maigret Sets a Trap). The rights were quickly bought by veteran director Jean Delannoy, Jean Gabin was cast as Maigret, and the film was released in 1958. Delannoy had been in the Resistance and Gabin had fought with the Free French, so there seem to have been no problems about Simenon and the wartime Maigret films. The novel was one of author’s best, a beautifully structured combination of serial-killer procedural and a tortured family relationship. The film, like the novel, is set during a heat wave, which subtly heightens the tension. Women are being killed late at night and the killer seems to be taunting the famous Superintendent Maigret. Maigret sets his trap and the police appear to have captured the killer—then there is another murder.

Jean Gabin had the screen presence and the confidence to play parts of key scenes back to the camera so that Delannoy could portray the action from Maigret’s perspective as Simenon does in the novel. Far less mannered than Laughton, Gabin makes a formidable Maigret—wily, compassionate and always dangerous. Delannoy directs in a plain elegant style that places the emphasis on the performances and the finely wrought script by Rodolphe-Maurice Arlaud, Michel Audiard and the director himself.

The film is available without subtitles. But an internet search for “Maigret Tend un Piège” reveals that a set of subtitles for the movie has been uploaded. A friend used some computer wizardry, which I don’t pretend to understand, that placed the titles on disc so I could view the film. 

There are no such problems with Maigret et l’Affair Saint Fiacre (1959) the film Delannoy made using the same adaptors after Maigret Sets a Trap proved so successful. Amazon has released an excellent subtitled version titled Inspector Maigret and the Saint Fiacre Affair but at present the DVD is not available internationally. The film is based on an early novel which I only located as Maigret Goes Home just before I was due to file. It is on its way so I will keep you posted.

The later film is in some ways similar to the conventional British mysteries of the period. There is even a sequence where Maigret summons all the suspects together to reveal the killer. But the film, and I suspect the original novel, is not just a mystery. Maigret returns to the town where he was raised when the Countess de Saint Fiacre, the widow of his old patron, receives a threatening letter. When she becomes the victim of a vicious murderer Maigret discovers the countess has been preyed upon by her employees and friends, all of whom are in different ways morally responsible for her death. Gabin was one of the great screen listeners and here he registers every nuance of the detective’s reactions to the probing questions he directs at the suspects.

Again Delannoy tells the story from Maigret’s point of view. A skilfully choreographed travelling shot follows the superintendent from the train to the café where he is to meet the Countess (Valentine Tessier). Throughout the film we watch Maigret muffled in the famous overcoat as he trudges through the town following one lead after another, the events unfolding only as he experiences them. The final unmasking of the killer is not so much the solution to a puzzle as an explosion of moral indignation as Maigret describes how his old friend was betrayed by her friends and family. It is splendidly played and culminates in one of the great Gabin rages. The story was done again in both the French and British television series that starred Bruno Cremer and Michael Gambon respectively; but good as both these episodes were, for me Delannoy’s version has never been surpassed.

The problems tracking down these DVDs is not very different from the long train and bus rides to revival houses critics of my generation undertook to see the films we had either missed or only read about. These “unseen” Maigrets are described here in the hope that distributors will be encouraged to make more of these classic works readily available in accessible versions.