L'Affaire Dominici (1973)
Directed by Claude Bernard-Aubert

Film Review

The Dominici Affair was one of the most high profile criminal investigations to hit the French and British headlines in the 1950s.  To this day, it is not known who murdered the British scientist Jack Drummond and his family, although many theories have been put forward, including an assassination carried out by Soviet agents.  The case is notable because of its flagrant failings of judicial procedure.  Gaston Dominici was arrested, tried and found guilty of a triple homicide on the basis of verbal testimony alone, testimony that was not supported by any material evidence.  Originally sentenced to death, Dominici had his sentence commuted in 1957 and was given a presidential pardon in 1960.  Had he been executed, this could well have been the most notorious miscarriage of French justice.

L'Affaire Dominici, the film that dramatised this cause célèbre, was made at a time, in the early 1970s, when public distrust in the judiciary was mushrooming and the movement to abolish capital punishment in France was rapidly gaining momentum.  Some high profile failings of the French judicial system (of which the Dominici Affair was just one) had inspired a number of films which added to calls to make the death sentence (by guillotine) history.  Of these, the most effective was Michel Drach's Le Pull-over rouge (1979), and it was two years after this film was released that capital punishment was finally abolished, one of the first acts of the Mitterand presidency.

Despite its coldly realistic approach, L'Affaire Dominici is a far from impartial film, and it's easy to see that its authors' sympathies are with Dominici, who is portrayed as a victim of an inept police investigation and a judicial process too keen to find a scapegoat.  At the end of the film, Emile Pollak, Dominici's defense lawyer, talks to the camera and points out the multiple flaws in the legal process which led to an obvious miscarriage of justice.  In the version that Pierre Boutron made for French television in 2003 (with Michel Serrault excelling in the lead role), it is the KGB who are blamed for the murder of Drummond and his family, allegedly because the victim had been engaged in spying operations for the British Intelligence service.

The film was directed by Claude Bernard-Aubert, who began his career with Patrouille de choc (1957), an impressive but controversial account of the Indochina War, but ended up directing pornographic movies under the name Burd Tranbaree.  L'Affaire Dominici is Bernard-Aubert's best-known film, and this it owes to an utterly compelling lead performance from Jean Gabin.  Nearing the end of his remarkable career, Gabin is at his most convincing as the likeably cantankerous patriarch who falls foul of French justice and deep-rooted enmities with his sons.  As Gabin's star fades, others would of course come to take its place, and two of these show up in this film: Victor Lanoux and Gérard Depardieu.

Film Synopsis

In August 1952, Sir Jack Drummond, his wife Anne and their ten-year-old daughter are taking a holiday in the Haute Provence region of France.  One morning, their bullet-riddled bodies are found near their car on a stretch of road adjacent to a farm owned by the Dominici family.  Over the months that follow, contradictory witness statements and a lack of material evidence impede the police investigation.  Under public pressure, the police extort a confession from the 75 year old patriarch Gaston Dominci after he is denounced by his sons, Gustave and Clovis.  When the case comes to court, Dominci retracts his confession, but even though there is no evidence against him the trial returns a guilty verdict...