La Tête d’un homme (1933) - film review

In a crowded Parisian café, Willy Ferrière, a penniless playboy, declares that he is willing to pay a hundred thousand francs to anyone who will kill his aunt, thereby allowing him to inherit a vast fortune.  A short while later, Ferrière’s aunt, a rich American, is murdered in her bed.  The police find a ready scapegoat in Joseph Heurtin, a dim-witted petty criminal whose foot and hand prints at the scene of the crime make him the obvious suspect.  But Inspector Maiget is not convinced that Heurtin is the killer, although the crook clearly knows more than he says.  Maigret allows Heurtin to escape and thereby finds his next lead, an impoverished Czech medical student named Radek.  Maigret is intrigued by Radek and is soon convinced that he is the killer, even though he apparently has no motive for the crime.  Radek is amused by Maigret’s interest in him, and even taunts him, confident that the police will never find enough evidence to convict him of the murder.  Radek is so sure that he has committed the perfect crime...

La Tête d’un homme was the third screen outing for Inspector Maigret, and the one that is most sympathetic to the original novel by Georges Simenon.  The film was famously remade as The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), with Charles Laughton in the role of Maigret, which explains why the novel was, for a time, retitled L’Homme de la tour Eiffel.  The previous year saw the release of two Maigret films, Le Chien jaune (1932) and La Nuit du carrefour (1932), in which the pipe-smoking sleuth was played respectively by Abel Tarride and Pierre Renoir.  So dissatisfied was he with these two films that Simenon resolved to write and direct the next Maigret adaptation himself.  He chose Renoir to reprise the part of Maigret and cast the Russian émigré Valéry Inkijinoff, the star of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia (1928), as the homicidal villain Radek.  

In the end, Simenon’s filmmaking ambitions came to nothing.  With his unconventional ideas, he was not considered a sound proposition so, once he had been paid off,  producers Marcel Vandal and Charles Delac hired Julien Divivier to direct the film in his place.  Duvivier retained Inkijinoff but replaced Renoir with Harry Baur, whom he had worked with on three previous films: David Golder (1930), Les Cinq gentlemen maudits (1931) and Poil de carotte (1932).  Divivier also dispensed with Simenon’s screenplay and requested a complete rewrite from Louis Delaprée and Pierre Caldmann.  Not surprisingly, Simenon took umbrage at the way he had, once again, been sidelined and resolved never to surrender the film rights of any of his novels.  The pledge lasted until 1940 when, through financial necessity, he could no longer refuse the large paycheques he was offered by film production companies who were eager to adapt his work.  To date, there have been over a hundred and twenty film and television adaptations of Simenon’s novels.

La Tête d’un homme is one of the few Simenon adaptations which perfectly recreates the bleak, melancholic atmosphere that characterises the author’s novels.  With its dingy lodging houses, crowded cafés, ambiguous characters and all-pervading aura of doom and decay, the film evokes a much seedier vision of 1930s Paris than the one that is more romantically portrayed by the poetic realists of the day.  Duvivier is well served by both his art director Georges Wakhévitch and his cinematographer Armand Thirard; together, they create a claustrophobic, shadow-laden world that somehow reflects the twisted labyrinthine mind of the villain Radek.  The film’s striking visual style is now instantly recognisable as early film noir, although it would be a decade before the film noir aesthetic became established in Hollywood.     

The film is also ahead of its time in its use of the subjective camera to achieve an intense psychological realism and heighten the tension at key dramatic moments.  There is a distinctly Hitchcockian edge to the way that Duvivier frames the psychological battle between Maigret and Radek - the camera not only takes us into Radek’s physical space, but also into his mental space.  It is no accident that as Maigret gets closer to unravelling the mystery, Radek’s surroundings become darker, more confined, more oppressive.  It is not Radek who is caught in the net, but Maigret.  As he gets closer to his prey, the redoubtable inspector increasingly resembles a fly being lured inexorably towards the centre of a spider’s web.

Harry Baur makes a far more interesting Maigret than most of the actors who played the part after him (Albert Préjean, Jean Gabin, Gino Cervi, Michael Gambon and Bruno Cremer, to name just five).   Baur’s Maigret is charismatic, opaque and mysterious.  On the one hand, he personifies the incorruptible crime investigator, one who will readily jeopardise his career to save an innocent man from the scaffold.  Yet he is also someone with a touch of the maverick, someone who has his own ideas about justice, and someone who at times appears troubled by the role he has to perform.   The Maigret that we find in La Tête d’un homme is not the confident Teflon-coated sleuth we are used to seeing in crime dramas, but rather someone who appears to be teetering on the brink of an existential crisis, a man who is morbidly fascinated and deeply perturbed by what he learns about human nature in the course of his work.

As impressive as Baur’s contribution is, his is not the finest performance the film offers.  That honour goes to Valéry Inkijinoff, who is extraordinary as Maigret’s nemesis Radek.  The ambiguity and depth of characterisation that Baur brings to his Maigret is perfectly matched by Inkijinoff in his portrayal of Radek,  who is far from being a conventional villain.  Radek resembles Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, an amoral anti-hero who commits murder not to destroy an individual but to inflict a blow on a society he has grown to despise.  With his brooding presence, Inkijinoff has no difficulty conveying the menace of a dangerous and warped psychopath, but he also brings a tragic quality to the part, so that, as sinister as Radek is, we cannot help sympathising with him.  As the Machiavellian killer stands enraptured by Damia’s haunting street song, we are confronted not with a madman, but with a pathetic soul that has known only rejection and contempt.  It is society that has destroyed Radek’s illusions and drove him onto the dark path, so it is society which should be judged for what ensues.   Inkijinoff would go on to make a career of playing sympathetic villains of this ilk, but he would seldom be as effective as he is here, in one of cinema’s most complex and unsettling portrayals of evil.

© James Travers 2010

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