Quai des Orfèvres

Quai des Orfèvres is formally divided into two parts, a Perry Mason murder and a Columbo investigation. The cæsura is a beautiful pause and a great discovery.

It begins in Tin Pan Alley (Paris) and moves to the Folies Eden, then to a photographer's studio, and finally the lodgings of a wealthy collector. The second part introduces police headquarters.

You will find in the books, doubtless, a sterling analysis of the American films from which Clouzot developed a style of ebullience (Van Dyke's Thin Man and Wellman's Lady of Burlesque seem related, as well as Hitchcock's Murder!), but it may be more to the point to know what films Clouzot did not see during the war and immediately after, especially The Big Sleep, to which there is a very remote connection in Chandler's idea of the detective story as a representation.

Part 1 with its obsessive jealousies corresponds to the Occupation, and Part 2 to postwar France. Thus, the murder is evidently precipitated by the starlet's desire to obtain a movie contract from the victim, who is threatened by her husband (a songwriter). Inspector Antoine has been a staff sergeant in the Foreign Legion (an amazing look from Jouvet as he tells this), advises a criminal suspect to try his luck in the colonies, and himself has a young son of apparently African descent. The boy, and malaria, are all he has to show for 15 years overseas, he says.

A police lineup of blondes smiling variously is repeated in Beat the Devil. At the end, Clouzot makes fun of Cocteau by emulating the famous snowball fight. A well-choreographed (as you might say) venture into the American-style press corps on Christmas Eve at the stationhouse opens with a joke ("I'm the one with the turkey") and modulates into Charles Dickens.

The opening sequence is a pellucid bit of foundation photography (backlit from the side) for the Hollywood lighting that follows.

The cast are all brilliant, and then there is Louis Jouvet, who around this time was onstage in Giraudoux, Claudel, Genêt and Molière. He invents Lieutenant Columbo (he needs a notebook because his memory is "like a sieve"... early on he has "lost his raincoat"), and at the end all but says "one more thing," which as it turns out is "just routine."

The "artiste" in part one becomes Barnivel, who introduced the inspector to the charms of Sunday photography, having murdered his own family and then photographed them all in their beds. "Ah! C'était un artiste!"

The influence of Picasso and Matisse is in evidence, perhaps, with the former's Rue de la Santé evoked as Martineau goes to confront the victim, and the latter's female portraits seeming to be the underpinnings of Clouzot's in a very subtle way.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002