Maigret’s Anatomy

Something about the plot construction in Continental Films’ Maigret movies results in them being hard to remember in detail. I’ve now seen the middle film, CECILE EST MORT!, directed by Maurice Tourneur, twice, and my lingering impression is of fun characterisation, complex plotting, and a few particular moments, but I couldn’t summarise it for you. Usually we judge films to be unusually successful when they linger in the memory, but these ones defy that truism — the compensation is that they’re giddily unpredictable as they unfold before you.

Once again Albert Prejean is Inspector Maigret and André Gabriello is his breathless accomplice Lucas. Once again Maigret is the only competent man on the force, which tends to arrest defenseless, innocent, and socially disadvantaged suspects and force confessions from them while Maigret is occupied catching the real culprit. This is as close to anti-copaganda as anyone could produce in Nazi-occupied France, though of course the fact that Maigret is around to insure no miscarriage of justice goes uncorrected does lessen the blow. Still, it’s surprisingly bold. Continental being a German company, they seem to have suffered less from censorship than the French outfits.

What I remember of the plot: there’s a headless body; a corpse turns up in a cupboard, as in both the other films of the series; Lucas rushes up with exciting news but talks to fast to be understood, as in both the other films; Maigret has already figured out the development Lucas is trying to inform him of, as in etc; a clue is discovered written in condensation on a mirror, as in Argento’s DEEP RED; sinister stuff with unknown intruders secretly inhabiting someone’s home, as in LES INCONNUS DANS LA MAISON, an even better Continental Films Simenon adaptation; use of dental anesthetic by bad guys.

I’ve never mastered mystery writing — you have to write them backwards, it seems, starting with what really happened and then burying that under obfuscating layers which are themselves laden with dramatic suspense. Simenon is really good at it — I’d like to read the three books Continental adapted to see how faithful they are, but I’m afraid by the time I do it the plots will all have got jumbled in my head. Already I can’t recall which one has the blind man who’s killed because he saw too much.

Tourneur’s direction lacks the fancy flourishes of Richard Pottier’s in the other two installments, but his love of creative shadowplay is in evidence, giving the film a nice noirish look.

A box set would be nice!

Fifty Shades of Maigret

Continental Films, the German company based in Paris at the time of the Occupation, which was sort of in command of the whole French film industry, produced four Georges Simenon adaptations, comprising Henri Decoin’s classic LES INCONNUS DANS LA MAISON, starring Raimu, and three Maigret films, directed by Richard Pottier, Maurice Tourneur, and Richard Poittier again.

I’ve just lately watched the Poittier entries — PICPUS and LES CAVES DU MAJESTIC. I saw the Tourneur, CECILE EST MORT!, but I can’t recall a thing about it except it was great. Time to revisit.

In all three films, Miagret is Albert Prejean and his sidekick Lucas is a fellow called Andre Gabriello. The writers adapting Simenon differ, and this seems to make a big difference. (Simenon wanted to work for Continental and adapt his own works, which may tell you something about him — most of the people who did work at the studio had no choice.) Simenon like Prejean’s performance as his hero, but there was initially some concern that Prejean, primarily a light comic, was too young and too lightweight to play the dour plodder, but audiences embraced him — the only two previous Maigrets, who appeared the same year, were Harry Baur and Pierre Renoir, working for Duvivier and Jean Renoir, who were much closer in age and temperament, though Baur, like later three-time-Maigret Gabin, was a bit more explosive than the character in the books.

The strange thing is, Prejean IS too lightweight, but the films solve that by bending the character to fit — this Maigret is many times more whimsical, flippant, and cheeky than the novels’ version and, like Benoit Blanc, he’s also a celebrity detective (which is not a thing). It’s as if it was felt that taking a famous fictional sleuth and putting him on the screen just naturally required that his fame needed to be acknowledged by the supporting cast. WE’VE all heard of Maigret, so why wouldn’t the populace in the films.

PICPUS is written by the fascinating Jean-Paul Le Chanois (a Jewish communist resistance member working for a German film company) who later became a hate figure for the nouvelle vague as a director of the cinema du papa school, but it needs to be noted that Henri-Georges Clouzot was head of the script department at Continental, and the humour smacks of his playfulness, black comedy and grotesquerie in, say, L’ASSASSIN HABITE… AU 21, and even LE CORBEAU. Fiona became convinced of this.

The plot in this one is insanely convoluted, and then magically boils down to a simple confrontation with very little summary required. A nice job of screenwriting.

There’s a crazy sequence where we’re suddenly at the Last of the Mohicans Archery Club and everybody’s wearing an Indian headdress — it’s interesting that Maurice Tourneur, who directed (co-directed, really) MOHICANS in Hollywood, was around, and would make the sequel. But he doesn’t seem to have ever been attached to this one — I now have a copy of Christine Leteux’s book Continental Films, which produces the receipts.

By the time of LES CAVES DU MAJESTIC, the last Continental production as the occupation ended, scripted this time by the great Charles Spaak, the comedic tone has been modified a bit to allow more emotion, and Prejean’s Maigret has reintegrated the character’s original interest in psychology and humanity — his interest in why is greater than who. But this had been blended with Prejean’s light persona, so that Maigret can say he’s forgotten all about the murder he’s supposed to solve, because he’s more concerned with the human fallout.

This is the film whose shooting is documented in Tavernier’s underrated LAISSEZ-PASSER — Spaak completed the film in prison after being arrested, and this partly explains why there’s so much talk about food in the film — the writer was starving and couldn’t think of anything else. But the film’s concentration on the theme of paternity becomes even more moving when you know that Spaak’s wife, pregnant with their first child, had also been arrested. They got out OK in the end.

Poittier’s more interesting than I had somehow assumed — he throws in a splitscreen shot in PICPUS (as Lucas briefs Maigret on a murder, we see the discovery of the body played out in a little box) and an impressive sequence shot in CAVES.

It’s curious — I tend to rate movie Maigrets on their resemblance to the literary figure, but Prejean’s portrayal demands to be judged differently, on the basis of how successful his warping of the role is. And it’s extremely successful, on its own terms.

All the facts here come from Leteux’s book and Tavernier’s film. Some of the speculations are mine.

The Sunday Intertitle: Wolfdunnit?

Today, for the Hammer & AMicus Blogathon, I’m looking at THE BEAST MUST DIE. No, not this one —

I haven’t seen the 1952 version of Nicholas Blake’s novel, but I have read the novel. Blake was the pen-name of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, father of Daniel, who moonlighted as a crime novelist. This his only book to have been adapted for the cinema, but his The Smiler With the Knife NEARLY became Orson Welles’ first film.

Not this one either ~

Claude Chabrol’s version of the same book is pretty good. Going by the cast list of the Argentinian version, it shares with Chabrol the unusual feature of eliminating the character of the detective. Blake/Day-Lewis created such a compelling pair of opposing characters in this story that his usual toff detective, Nigel Strangeways, just gets in the way. And in Smiler, he’s almost completely sidelined, his adventurous wife taking centre stage (Welles hoped to cast Lucille Ball, with himself as homegrown fascist villain).

But no, Amicus head Milton Subotsky chose to adapt a short story by Star Trek writer James Blish and give it Blake’s title (a biblical quotation) — but it’s STILL a country house detective story, with a slight twist. There will be spoilers ahead.

Taking this challenge seriously, I’m basically live-blogging this so you can see if I’m able to ID the skin-changer. Who’s hairy on the inside at this weekend party?

In my experience, seventies werewolves tend to wear plaid shirts, like lumberjacks (perhaps harking back to WOLFBLOOD, the silent movie combining lycanthropy and lumberjacking which I wrote about here. The first lumberthrope movie? So I’ll be watching this one waiting for someone to turn up in an ugly shirt, My money’s on Michael Gambon as the cast member likeliest to display hideous fashion sense. But I am aware of a complicating factor: the movie was also released, in an attempt to cash in on the blacksploitation craze, as BLACK WEREWOLF, which would seem to narrow the choices down to Calvin Lockhart and Marlene Clark. And is, quite frankly, a terrible title for a whodunnit.

We begin with a freeze-fame of our werewolf — ALSO a terrible spoiler — and the insinuating tones of Valentine Dyall, purring a redundant VO which is also spelled out in superimposed titles.

Helicopter shot over what looks like Scottish heather, but may in fact be the grounds of Shepperton, and Calvin Coolidge Lockhart is being hunted by a private army and a helicopter, through a wood wired for sound by Anton Diffring who sits aloof in a control room with a video wall.

This movie is THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND avant la lettre, isn’t it? Which is to say, Ten Little Indians with a video wall. I wonder if Robert Ludlum saw it and thought, “Needs a better title!”

The cast contains Dumbledore II, Ernst Stavros Blofeld (again), Ganja Meda, Irving Amadeus, the Grand Moff Tarkin and Reinhard Heydrich, so it’s quite a house party.

Two cast members lack iconic signature roles — but Ciaran Madden would reunite with Dumbledore Michael Gambon in 1992 when she played Mm. Maigret to his titular sleuth, and Tom Chadbon has a memorable bit part in JUGGERNAUT (“I’d spent it, hadn’t I?”) though of course I find all the bit parts memorable in that one.

Chadbon, whose voice here fluctuates between early Malcolm McDowell and anorak on the bus man, is an absolute joy in his puffy shirts.

The dialogue is a hoot — “One of our guests is a werewolf: I know it,” intones Lockhart. “Then why did you INVITE them?” asks his wife, quite reasonably. What adds to the strangeness is that most of the cast are either playing the wrong nationality — Anton Diffring is being Polish, Peter Cushing German — or are dubbed — Marlene Clark has been revoiced by Scottish jazz singer and actress Annie Ross, who performed the same service for Britt Ekland in THE WICKER MAN — or just have naturally amusing voices, like Chadbon and Gray (whose voice we’re used to hearing come out of Jack Hawkins’ mouth).

Anton sips his Bailey’s and gazes at his video wall like a kind of Thomas Jerome Teuton.

Director Paul Annett was an experienced second unit man for TV, shooting the location action sequences on film for British shows that would revert to video as soon as the characters moved indoors. For his sins, he does provide an endless car chase between Lockhart and Gambon that saps my will to live whenever I try to watch this movie. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember who the werewolf is — the car chase always defeats me. Well, this time, I’m as obsessed as Lockhart to get to the bottom of this, lacking only the attractive high cheekbones (with Lockhart and Cushing and Diffring and even Gray, this film sports perhaps the finest assemblage of cheekbones ever captured on celluloid — a thespic Himalayan range of facial promontories).

“Lost in time… and lost in space… and meaning…”

When the movie isn’t doing helicopter chases and such, Annett and ace cameraman Jack Hildyard (BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI) manage a lot of stylish and dynamic shooting, prone to zoom abuse, it’s true, but it’s 1973 after all… it’s fair to say the movie does resemble a glossy TV thriller of the period (e.g. The Persuaders) more than a horror movie. Well Subotsky liked monsters but not gore or sex or violence or anything too disturbing…

Much of the film consists of Lockhart and Diffring spying on the guest bedrooms, searching for signs of incipient werewolfism in the invitees. As Anton watches Chadbon strip to the waist, he muses, “Lots of men have hair on their chests,” projecting the suave confidence of a man who knows whereof he speaks. “And on the backs of their hands?” objects Lockhart, as if this were the unlikeliest thing on earth. He’s never met Len Deighton.

The eyes, quite apart from being the windows of the soul, are the tasty bit.

After the first killing — offscreen, but leaving a gory aftermath — we see all their guests in their PJs — Charles Gray sports a vivid paisley dressing gown, and Gambon once again goes for a subtle but distinct check. The rules of fashion dictate he MUST be the wolfman in their midst!

But at dinner, he wears a brown velvet smoking jacket and a shirt with a collar of startling wingspan. Not a check in sight.

Gambon is definitely soft on werewolves, though — his first act as Dumbledore was to hire a lycan schoolmaster.

I bloody hate day for night photography, personally.

Like THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, this movie shares cast members with the almighty INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED, two of them this time (Lockhart & Cushing).

The Sunday Intertitle this week is from The Werewolf Break, where Valentine Dyall — The Man in Black — returns on the soundtrack to invite us to guess who the shaggy killer is.

 

It’s twenty past werewolf.

And in fact the ending pulls off quite a few cunning twists — I wasn’t emotionally engaged enough to really care who’s wolfie, but the reversals and revelations pile on top of one another turn it into quite a nice conclusion. Here comes the spoilers — first hairy hand is spotted on Marlene Clark, so that her hubbie has to administer the silver bullet, and then it turns out she’s been cross-infected by a golden retriever who’d been gored by the ORIGINAL werewolf —

— an Alsatian in a woolly waistcoat, finally revealed as —

 
 

BLOODY MICHAEL GAMBON! I KNEW IT!

This has been an entry in the Hammer Amicus Blogathon run by Cinematic Catharsis and  Real Weegie Midget Reviews.