Quai des Orfèvres (1947)

Quai des Orfèvres is a French thriller film first released in 1947, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.  The film is based on a novel by Stanislas-André Steeman and stars Suzy Delair, Bernard Blier, Louis Jouvet, Simone Renant and Jean Daurand.  It has also been released under the title: Jenny Lamour.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Jenny Lamour is a talented music hall singer who is determined to advance her career.  When film producer Georges Brignon hints that he may be able to get her into the movies, she agrees to meet him in secret, ignoring warnings from her friend Dora that the man is a scheming Lothario.  Jenny’s husband Maurice is outraged when he hears of this and threatens to kill Brignon.  Having arranged what he thinks to be a flawless alibi, Maurice heads off to Brignon’s home, only to find that the man has already been murdered.  Little does he know that Jenny struck the film producer with a wine bottle earlier that evening.  Police Inspector Antoine has little difficulty demolishing Maurice’s alibi and soon has an open and shut case against him.  When Maurice is arrested, Jenny faces a terrible dilemma.  To save her husband from the guillotine she must confess to Brignon’s murder...

It was with the support of the actor Louis Jouvet that Henri-Georges Clouzot was able to resume his filmmaking career after a four year break and go on to make some of his greatest films, of which Quai des Orfèvres is undoubtedly one.  The reaction to Clouzot’s previous film, Le Corbeau (1943), had been almost unanimously negative and resulted in the director being banned from working in the French film industry after the Liberation for alleged Nazi collaboration.  Clouzot redeemed himself in a spectacular fashion with his next film, an atmospheric investigative crime drama that not only won him the Best Director award at the Venice Film Festival in 1947 but also laid the foundations for the modern film policier, one of French cinema’s most popular genres.  The film also provided Jouvet with his last great role, that of a world-weary limpet-like police inspector who lies somewhere between Jules Maigret and Lieutenant Columbo.

Quai des Orfèvres is very loosely based on the novel Légitime défense by the well-known crime writer Stanislas-André Steeman.  This was Clouzot’s third Steeman adaptation - he had made his directing debut with L’Assassin habite au 21 (1942) and previously worked on the screenplay for Georges Lacombe’s Le Dernier des six (1941), both effective reworkings of Steeman novels.  Another thing these two films had in common was that they featured a rising star of French cinema, Suzy Delair, a vivacious stage and cabaret performer who enjoyed great success as a singer, dancer and actress.  Quai des Orfèvres gave Delair (at the time Clouzot’s long-standing partner - they separated after this film) her most memorable screen role and the one that fits her most perfectly, that of the go-getting music hall singer who is prepared to do anything to advance her career.  One of the interesting aspects of the film is the similarity between the two characters played by Delair and her co-star Jouvet.  Both are cynically motivated and resort to skulduggery to achieve their ends, but both are ultimately revealed to have a heart of gold (Delair is willing to give up her own life to save her husband, Jouvet risks ostracisation by adopting a black boy).  Similar apparent character inconsistencies abound in this film, contrasting with the more one dimensional characterization of Clouzot’s subsequent films, which generally offer a much less ambiguous, far gloomier assessment of human nature.  The film is also notable for featuring a sympathetic lesbian, beautifully played by the stunning Simone Renant, arguably the most likeable character in Clouzot’s entire oeuvre.  Other distinguished performances are supplied by Bernard Blier, superb as the jealous husband who gets caught up in the wheels of justice, and Charles Dullin, deliciously evil as a hunchbacked skirt-chaser, sadly his last film appearance.  Avid French film fans should have no trouble spotting another familiar face, that of Robert Dalban very early in his career.

It was Clouzot’s subsequent film Les Diaboliques (1955) which prompted reviewers to pin on him the epithet of France’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock.  However, Quai des Orfèvres is a far more recognisably Hitchcockian piece, in both its subject and its style, although it is hard to say to what extent Clouzot was actually influenced by the Master of Suspense.  The central plot device of a man wrongly accused of a crime is one that frequently recurs in Hitchcock’s films, most notably in Saboteur (1942) and The Wrong Man (1956), and the ambiguous characterisation, the lack of a clearly defined boundary between good and evil, also lends a distinctly Hitchcockian touch.  However, what most gives the film its Hitchcockian resonance is the way in which it is faultlessly photographed and edited, to heighten the drama, wrong-foot the spectator and ratchet up the suspense to a nerve-wracking climax.  

Armand Thirard’s atmospheric cinematography brings a film noir murkiness, a stench of moral decay, that feels appropriate for the seedy Parisian settings and adds to the oppressive mood, which Clouzot occasionally relives with some unexpected comic flourishes (a milk pan boiling over serves as a laughably crude metaphor for the unleashed male libido).  Camera motion is used imaginatively, not gratuitously, to inject a sense of growing menace, a sense that Maurice (Blier) is bring manoeuvred to his destruction by the cruel hand of fate, and that nothing will save him.  The striking camera zoom which shows Maurice being lured to his seductive wife (irresistible in her frilly French underwear) is repeated a short while later when he discovers the body of the murder victim, making the connection between desire and destruction blisteringly evident and thereby persuading us that he is a doomed man.  

Yet, despite the abundance of Hitchcockian motifs, Quai des Orfèvres is evidently far more than a shallow imitation of Hitchcock.  Clearly it has far more substance to it than the plethora of police procedural dramas it inspired in following decades.  Rather, it is a compelling and deeply disturbing study in the ease with which human beings allow themselves to be deceived by appearances.  It warns us that we should never take things at face value, never rush to judgement, never be too eager to press the button that will fry the condemned man.  If there is a single unifying theme to Clouzot’s oeuvre, it is that things are never quite what they seem.  The truth is always far darker, far more fantastic and convoluted than we can ever imagine.  Seeing isn’t necessarily believing.

© James Travers 2011


Grim, dark and utterly ambiguous, Quai des orfèvres (literally, Goldsmiths’ Wharf) has had my mind in its grip--my heart slipped out somewhere along the way--since I saw it for the first time yesterday afternoon. Distributed by Rialto Pictures, which has similarly restored and recently unveiled Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1936) and Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955), this postwar film noir is as strange a film as I have seen.

It seems to exist on two parallel planes that in fact, however physically impossible this may be, stunningly converge. The point of convergence is the moral murkiness of self-sacrifice, selflessness, and pure love. On one level, we watch a number of characters whose actions are motivated by love. However, love here is often activated by guilt, for the basis of most of the loving acts we witness in the film is greed, career ambition, sexual jealousy--not uplifting behavior. Thus another level compels us to question whatever altruism we may glimpse. Indeed, the seedy, vicious environment in which the action unfolds comes to us first, the "loving" acts after, and these acts are never allowed by the filmmaker to transcend the environment.

The filmmaker is Henri-Georges Clouzot, who with Jean Ferry adapted Stanislas-André Steeman’s novel Légitime Défense. Clouzot was named best director at Venice for this coldly captivating piece of work. My imagination prods me to believe something about Clouzot’s Quai des orfèvres. The film’s dim music hall, one of so many elements that invokes Alfred Hitchcock in his prewar British period, perhaps suggests an entertainment venue closer to Clouzot’s--can we use this word with reference to Clouzot?--heart: cinema.

Is it possible that the film is somehow about the nearly blacklisted Clouzot, about the burden he bore because countrymen of his identified him with the Germans who had occupied France and with whom he had to deal since it was they--the Germans--who controlled the French film industry during the war? (The principal bone of contention was his 1943 film Le corbeau, whose stinging portrait of provincial French life many viewed as traitorous.) Isn’t it possible that Clouzot, retaliating against assaults on his loyalty, is questioning the altruism of his attackers? So much of the film’s ambiguity, at least to me, seems to derive from the kind of complexity of circumstance and motivation that Clouzot may have felt that others were self-righteously ignoring, even denying, in their attempts to tidy up the national past at his (and others’) expense. (In Italy, Rossellini’s Rome, Open City protected his national reputation, post-Fascism, from his previous service to Mussolini’s state, which controlled the film industry. One cannot develop one’s craft without practicing it, and Clouzot and Rossellini thus found themselves in a virtual bind.)

The main character in Quai des orfèvres, at least in the first half, comes equipped with a stage name, Jenny Lamour (in a flamboyant performance, Suzy Delair--an emotionally riotous, larger-than-life version of Simone Simon). Jenny, who sings, is ambitious; she fancies herself Edith Piaf. Certainly there is hanging about the plot two persons who involved themselves in Piaf’s early career: the pimp who, failing to impress Piaf into his stable of workers, nevertheless continued to exert influence on her career somewhere between harassment and blackmail; and club owner Louis Leplée, whose 1936 murder left the singer an actual suspect. However, whereas Piaf emerged a hero of the French Resistance, Jenny Lamour seems incredibly selfish in her career-mindedness--more hawk than sparrow. Despite husband Maurice Martineau’s protestations, she pursues the attentions of Brignon, a licentious industrialist who can advance her career. (Bertrand Blier is splendid as the sadsack spouse; Charles Dullin, the soul of soullessness as Brignon.) Brignon ends up dead in his home. Jenny, who cracked a champagne bottle over his head to stave off predatory advances, assumes she is his killer. In jealous pursuit of the man he (wrongly) believes has been cuckolding him (Jenny has been too focused on career to be unfaithful), Maurice, packing a pistol, stumbles across the corpse and also believes that his wife is the killer, especially once the couple’s friend Dora, believing it from what Jenny told her, adds conviction to the suspicion.

Dora has done more than that; she has entered the crime scene in order to retrieve evidence that Jenny left behind (a tacky fox fur-in one piece of clothing, the confusion of stage life and real life) and to wipe things of Jenny’s fingerprints. She has completely escaped the radar of Maurice’s jealousy, but she is in love with Jenny, and the image of her triumphant in the bustling city street at night, her shoulders resourcefully wrapped by Jenny’s fur piece, constitutes one of cinema’s most extraordinary instances of sexual sublimation. (Simone Renant brings a glimmer of tragedy to Dora; it’s as close as the film comes to a sympathetic adult characterization.) Maurice is eventually arrested for the murder by the police, but Jenny also is vulnerable to official suspicion; to spare her arrest and imprisonment, Maurice attempts suicide to certify his guilt. He doesn’t succeed, but his action here brings his wife devotedly to his side. (If Clouzot’s film looks back to Hitchcock, it looks ahead to Chabrol, whose La femme infidèle and Le boucher (both 1969) seem in particular descendants.)

The film ends with the revelation of the real killer’s identity--a passer-by. All’s well that ends well, except that Maurice and Jenny’s marriage, continuing to lack foundation, is (for the moment happily) held together by the glue of guilt and tawdry, indeed blaspheming self-sacrifice. Like John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) and so many noirs, Clouzot’s film is a film of blackness and of night--not the night of romance, even though the scene is set in Paris, but a night of horror and entrapment. (The superb black-and-white cinematographer is Clouzot’s other eye, Armand Thirard, who would also contribute to, among other Clouzot films, Manon (1948), The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les diaboliques (1954).) It isn’t the cobweb of fate, however, that entraps these souls but their own lies, and more lies, to the police, without which the murder might have been solved much sooner. (Alas, the resultant attenuated nature of the film was something of a chore for me to navigate--since it is expressive, a "blemish" that may indeed fade and disappear over the course of future viewings.) These lies resonate with soaring self-sacrificial love and such shabbiness, and the shabbiness redefines the love, trapping it in a barred prison.

One of the film’s most potent images finds Maurice bucking the tide of pedestrian traffic as, in tandem with people leaving the music hall after an evening’s entertainment, he tries to return there in order to establish an alibi after coming from the dead man’s apartment. In a panic, he has put himself into this nearly impossible physical situation; amazingly he prevails by getting through, but the alibi wobbles indoors as one of the performers, a magician, is surprised to discover the disaster he, the magician, experienced onstage that night--a detail he will innocently relay to the police.  Maurice’s own magic is bankrupt because he will be telling lie upon lie upon lie; and when you consider that his motive for all this may be as much the façade of his marriage as his love for his wife, virtue again seems to dissolve into shabbiness, seediness and vice.

The film ends on Christmas, and the irony stings; it isn’t that we haven’t seen Christian acts throughout, for we have, but the pitilessly analytical examination of them that Clouzot has provided throws into question those Christian acts. An oversized Christmas tree in the Martineaus’ apartment seems to suck the life out of the air and surely cramps the space, creating another image of entrapment.

The second half of the film is dominated by another character entirely: Inspector Antoine, who is the lead police investigator on the Brignon case. Weary though confident, Antoine seems to be fueled by carbon dioxide instead of oxygen; he is inseparable from the seediness of the environment, and he is in fact, rather than a crime-solving hero, perhaps the most ambiguous character of all in the film. (Louis Jouvet is brilliant in this role.) It’s an elusive thing, hard to describe, but the oddly passive, somehow inverted nature of the man makes him almost an accomplice to the lies those he interrogates tell. (Like Pharaon De Winter, the police investigator in Bruno Dumont’s 1999 Humanité, one can almost imagine that Antoine himself is the killer.)

Apart from his work, which involving homicide is of course in itself unsettling, disturbing, his seems almost to be a secret life, something suspiciously kept from public view. Like Dora, he seems to be an intensely lonely individual, although he has a school-age son, in his beret the perfect image of a little French boy. The boy is black--". . . all I have left from my time in the colonies," Antoine explains. But the boy is very dark-skinned, and it’s possible that Antoine has adopted the boy off the street. Theirs is a loving relationship, and indeed the film ends with father and son in a public embrace after the latter pelts the former with a snowball outside the Martineaus’ window.

Why bother with a misgiving then? (The absurd swell of music would seem to cut off ambiguity.) Well, there’s the nature of the rest of the film, with lie on top of lie hiding not only actions but motivation. Moreover, the interplay between this parent and offspring involves much of the same self-sacrificial nonsense that underpins other activities in the film. The boy is home from boarding school; he has just failed his mathematics test, so he won’t be returning to school; it is math that he and his father had been concentrating on, so the suggestion subtly arises that the boy failed the exam deliberately so that he might rejoin his father, and his father somehow seems accomplice to this pint-sized deception. Combine this with the predatory nature of Brignon, and with something else besides, and a phantom suggestion takes elusive shape. The "something else" is a fleeting shot early on of two overripely buttocked boys in clinging shorts--a very brief kind of attention that will come rather to the full with images of the boys at the boarding school in Les diaboliques. One can accept Antoine, surely, as a doting and devoted father; but pedophilia isn’t out of the question. It certainly would be of a piece with the environment that Clouzot’s film as a whole portrays.

In conclusion, I feel that Clouzot intended to prick virtue’s façade to sound out whatever rottenness lay behind it. My guess that this had something to do with the "virtue" he felt was arrayed against him is just that: A guess. But it makes for a sad and haunting fit.

© Dennis Grunes 2003

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