Entre onze heures et minuit (1949) - film review

Between eleven o’clock and midnight one evening, a notorious trafficker Jérôme Vidauban is shot dead whilst walking in a subway in Paris.  The case is assigned to Inspector Carrel, who is Vidauban’s perfect double.  Using his resemblance to the arch criminal, Carrel manages to infiltrate Vidauban’s circle of acquaintances and contacts.  He becomes embroiled in a bizarre web of intrigue and discovers no shortage of possible murder suspects, all of whom appear to be surprised to see him still alive…

Although Entre onze heures et minuit was presumably intended as a homage to the American film noir thriller, and does imitate the classic noir style to great effect, you could easily mistake it for a very cheeky parody of the genre.  This is evident in the opening sequence which, rather than draw a discrete veil over the plot’s biggest contrivance (the fact that the main protagonist is the exact double of a man whose murder he is investigating), instead draws our attention to it with as much subtlety as a brass band on roller skates.   The main problem that Henri Decoin faced when making the film was knowing that his leading man, Louis Jouvet, had very recently starred in another French thriller in which he played a dual role, Jean Dréville’s Copie conforme (1947).  Rather than hire another actor to avoid a nasty case of déjà vu, Decoin and his screenwriting team came up with a comedy opening which attempts to defend the indefensible, essentially by saying that if Edward G. Robinson can get away with it - in The Whole Town’s Talking (1935) – so can Louis Jouvet.  Methinks the lady doth protest too much... 

The comedy teaser aside, Entre onze heures et minuit is actually one of Henri Decoin’s better films, certainly one of his more stylish thrillers and a very respectable example of 1940s French film noir.  Employing slanted camera angles, overlapping dissolves and high contrast photography with almost wanton abandon, the film looks like a perfect pastiche of American film noir, but it also has a distinctly Gallic feel to it. The characters are not as hard-bitten or as cynical as their American counterparts, and the moral boundary between the good guys and the villains is more rigidly defined.  There is also a great deal of humour, although much of this is not readily apparent on a first viewing (when the spectator is too busy trying to untangle the labyrinthine plot to look for jokes).  Of course, some of the humour is shamelessly blatant, such as the haute couture fashion exhibition, in which wealthy patrons bid for outfits with such names as "I shot down a cop", before being held up by armed gangsters.  Stylistically, the film sometimes bears an uncanny resemblance to Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), which was released a few months after this film (Reed, like Decoin, was presumably heavily influenced by American film noir).     
   
As in all of his films, Louis Jouvet dominates the proceedings with his familiar brooding presence and an unbeatable charisma.  Skilfully underplaying the comedy (almost to the point that you need a microscope to see it), Jouvet gives a compelling performance which masterfully conceals his character’s intentions.  It is natural to suppose that by impersonating the gangster Vidauban, Inspector Carrel risks being diverted from the straight and narrow, but the moral authority that Jouvet brings to his portrayal suggests otherwise.  The main element of suspense in the film is how Jouvet’s character will emerge at the end of his tortuous adventure.  The outcome is both satisfying and surprising, very different from what you might have expected in an American film noir.  It is interesting that in Jouvet’s principled crime investigator we can already see the origins of the maverick fictional cops of later decades, Harry Callahan and his illustrious rule-book-hating ilk.

© James Travers 2011

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