L’Étrange Monsieur Victor (1937) - film review

Outwardly, Monsieur Victor is the model citizen – a respectable Toulon shopkeeper, with a loving wife, courteous and charming to all.  However, behind this veneer of respectability hides a notorious receiver of stolen goods, who trades with hardened crooks.   Victor manages to keep up his double life with no problems, until the day when one of his crooks threatens to blackmail him.  Fearing a scandal, Victor kills the crook in a moment of panic, using a shoemaker’s tool.  The murder is blamed on a local shoemaker, who is sentenced to ten years’ hard labour.  Seven years later, the former shoemaker reappears in Toulon.  The first person to recognise him is Monsieur Victor…

L’Étrange Monsieur Victor is unquestionably one of Jean Grémillon’s best films, an atmospheric, sombre tale of guilt, betrayal and retribution.  The alternating moods of the settings – from the intimate family scenes in Victor’s household to the clandestine meetings between Victor and his criminal allies – reflect the changing moods of the central protagonist, Victor, played by the incomparable Raimu.  Far from being a conventional villain, Victor is a complex and passionate individual, one who is capable of great kindness, and also great brutality.  It is the conflict between his own guilt and the need to defend his family, ironically his better qualities, which ultimately destroy him.

In one of the best in this legendary actor’s many towering film performances, Raimu dominates every scene he appears in.  He is both sympathetic and menacing in a way that perhaps no actor of her era could be.  It is his presence in this film, more than anything, which makes it such a memorable film, affording it the status of a masterpiece.  This is not to underrate the contribution made by Raimu’s co-stars, which include the excellent Pierre Blanchar, Madeleine Renaud and Viviane Romance.

© James Travers 2001

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