Un témoin dans la ville is a French thriller film first released in 1959, directed by Edouard Molinaro.  The film is based on a novel by Thomas Narcejac and Pierre Boileau and stars Lino Ventura, Sandra Milo, Franco Fabrizi, Jacques Berthier and Daniel Ceccaldi.  It has also been released under the title: Witness in the City.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Acquitted for the murder of his mistress, industrialist Verdier returns home one evening to face the dead woman’s vengeful husband, Ancelin.  Verdier’s long over-due execution is well-planned and swift, but when Ancelin leaves his house, he runs into a taxi driver ordered by Verdier.   Ancelin has no option but to pursue the taxi driver, but for some reason he finds it hard to kill him...

With two successful crime dramas under his belt, director Edouard Molinaro stays with the genre and delivers what is quite possibly his darkest and most stylish film.  Taking his inspiration from American noir thrillers and their French counterparts – notably the policiers films of Jean-Pierre Melville – Molinaro constructs a well-honed suspense thriller which, despite the threadbare plot and sparse dialogue, is extraordinarily compelling.

By the late 1950s, the policier was beginning to become a tired, formulaic genre in French cinema, although still remarkably popular.  Un témoin dans la ville is in a different league altogether, almost an art film, thanks to its beautifully evocative design and noir photography (one of cinematographer Henri Decaë’s best pieces of work), which give the film a sinister existentialist feel, as well as a striking sense of cold realism.

Daringly, the narrative is focussed almost entirely on one character - played superbly by Lino Ventura, an ex-wrestler who had a very successful career playing hard men in films such as this.  In one of his few roles as an antipathetic villain, Ventura brings an intensity to the film which makes his character’s increasingly desperate attempts to extricate himself from the mess he has got himself into utterly gripping, and with a nice touch of pathos.

© James Travers 2008

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