Tous peuvent me tuer (1957)
Directed by Henri Decoin

Film Review

In the last decade of his career as a film director, Henri Decoin pretty well gave up trying to impress the critics and instead concentrated his efforts on the less challenging and more worthwhile task of entertaining a mainstream cinema audience.  Some would argue that Decoin never made a good film after La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (1952), but whilst it is true that his last half a dozen or so films have little to commend them, there are some stylish crowdpleasers to be enjoyed from Decoin's twilight years.  These include the grimly naturalistic polar Razzia sur la chnouf (1955), moody period drama L'Affaire des poisons (1955) and suspenseful wartime thriller La Chatte (1958).  Tous peuvent me tuer is also of interest because of its seemingly insane attempt to turn a classic heist movie-cum-prison drama into an Agatha Christie whodunnit, with a large dose of Ealing-style comedy thrown in for no reason whatsoever.

Spectacular plot twists are something we have come to expect from a good film noir thriller.  But spectacular genre twists?  When a film starts out as Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and segues into Le Trou (1960), you don't expect it to suddenly switch gear and turn into something resembling a Coen brothers take on Ten Little Indians.  This presumably wasn't a weird enough stunt for the film's authors, so they also tossed in an apparently lobotomised comedy warder (Francis Blanche at his dimmest) and a prisoner governor who looks as if he would have difficulty running a primary school, let alone a prison (François Périer at his most neurotic).  As the bodies start to pile up, it's not the subsequent victims we are concerned for, but the inconvenienced governor, who clearly hadn't reckoned on having to deal with something as difficult as a spate of random deaths when he joined the prison service.

What makes the film so bizarre (to the extent that it probably rates as Decoin's strangest film) is that, as it switches erratically between wacky comedy and your standard 1950s-era French thriller, it never ceases for a second to look like a succulently stylish classic film noir.  Pierre Montazel's beautifully atmospheric cinematography is consistently moody and oppressive, its use of dramatic shadows and skewed camera angles being visually effective even when the comedy starts to take over.  Without its soundtrack, Tous peuvent me tuer would look as relentlessly sober and grim as any other hard-boiled noir thriller of this time.  In fact, the comedy component of the film seems to be mostly confined to the contributions from Francis Blanche and François Périer.  It's almost as if Decoin privately told Blanche and Périer this was a full-throttle comedy, after leading everyone else involved in the production to believe it was a straight down-the-line thriller.  You wonder why Blanche and Périer didn't go on to form a successful comedy double act after this.

The eccentric plot we can blame on André Versini, who not only scripted the film - with some assistance from Decoin and seasoned crime-writer Albert Simonin (of Grisbi fame) - but also took one of the principal roles, implausibly a criminal associate of Peter van Eyck, and even less plausibly affianced to Anouk Aimée.  Neither of these other two actors is well-served by the film - van Eyck was presumably roped in on account of his cold Germanic looks to give at least a smidgen of credibility to the hold-up sequence at the start of the film; Aimée just wanders in and out of the narrative like a forlorn out-of-work actress desperately waiting for someone to give her a job.  Aimée is a star-in-the-making clearly destined for far better things, and the same applies to debutants Jean-Pierre Marielle and Jean-Claude Brialy, who crop up briefly - alas too briefly to have any real impact.

The film is positively overloaded with acting talent but only one actor acquits himself by doing what the script demands of him and no more - Pierre Mondy.  Tous peuvent me tuer could have been a genre-hopping disaster, but Decoin's direction, Montazel's photography and Mondy's solid presence are the three things that anchor it in reality, or at least a near appoximation to it.  The over-egged comedy does get wearisome in some scenes but all this is forgiven when Decoin slots in a brilliant visual gag involving a poster for Robert Bresson's Un condamné à mort s'est échappé.  The gag definitely would not have worked with the film's English title: A Man Escaped.  In summing up the film, it's fair to say that Decoin got away with it - but only just.

Film Synopsis

Tony wants nothing more than to marry Isabelle and lead an honest life, but first he must make some money.  This he plans to do by taking part in a hold-up with four other men, led by Cyril Glad, a tourist guide.  The robbery is a success, and after hiding the stash of stolen jewels in the base of a statue, the five men break into a distillery and get themselves wildly drunk, thus providing themselves with a perfect alibi for the crime they have committed.  The five men are promptly arrested by the police and sent to prison for one year, exactly as they had planned.  But what happens next is definitely not what was foreseen.  One of the five men falls to his death from a great height.  It looks like suicide, but then, when another of Glad's gang of five is found to have hanged himself in the prison shower, a pattern begins to emerge.  One by one, Tony's criminal associates meet a grisly end, until he is the only one left alive.  It is now obvious what is going to happen next.  Tony is about to become victim number five.  But who is the killer and what possible motive could he have...?