IMDb meta-data: runtime of 1 hour and 24 minutes, rated 7.1 by 91 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi, Maigret
Verdict: Superb.
Maigretistas will instantly recognise Saint-Fiarce as the tiny village where Maigret was born and raised. In the film he is accompanied by his wife, Louise, who has a thing or two to say to him as the plot unfolds. Nicely done. For once Madame Maigret does more than make the coffee. In the book, which I re-read after watching this film version, he is alone. In both there is a letter in which a murder is announced: à la of Agatha Christie.
In the book, the letter is sent to the local plod who passed it up the line and by chance Maigret saw a photograph copy of it on a desk in the Quai des Orfevres, and decides to go and see for himself. In the film, the letter is sent directly to Maigret lui-même as a personal challenge. In neither case is there an adequate explanation of why the letter is sent at all, though perhaps it was part of the plan to implicate the Count, as below.
The murder is ingenious, and kills the widowed Countess de Saint-Fiacre. Her wastrel son, the Count, is the obvious villain who wishes to hasten his inheritance. He is played in the film by Jacques Speisser who is marvellous as the troubled, tortured, intelligent, sensitive, confused, angry, and brutish Count de Saint-Fiarce. The pain in eyes at times is evident, even when his words belie it.
In the book, the final denouement at dinner is entirely the handiwork of the Count, casting Maigret as a spectator. In this film version the suggestion is that Maigret and Count have conspired to set it. The doctor is also effectively enlarged in the film. Indeed, in the film the Countess is also given a personality lacking in the book. The plot against her and the count is much more elaborate in the book than in this film, too.
In both film and book it is also apparent that, though the sanctimonious priest will not violate the confessional, he will take matters into his own hands, infuriating Maigret.
The story has been filmed at least three times before.
The high points of this version include Madame Maigret telling Jules to pull his socks up and stop mooning about like a schoolboy, and the Count’s anguish.
Jacques Spiesser
By the way, Spiesser is still at work as Magellan in an eponymous television series that has been running since 2009. He has also played second-fiddle Danglard in the Adamsberg krimis.
IMDB meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 25 minutes, rated 7.0 by 99 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi, Maigret (bien sûr)
Verdict: (Où est Fantômas?)
Long-serving and long-suffering Inspector Joseph Lognon is shot in the street and lies comatose near death; Maigret comes to investigate. Lognon is a recurrent figure (six times in all) in the Maigret oeuvre, and we know a little about him. He is dogged but unimaginative, a slave to his invalid wife at home, and while conscientious to a fault he seems jinxed at work, i.e., if there is hole then he is the one who will step in it. Maigret is one of the few people who is patient enough to suffer Lognon’s constant bad humour.
Now that I have seen four of these 1990s revivals of Maigret, clearly the aim was to re-new the franchise by changing the settings, and in some cases, revising the plots. The aim was not to be faithful to the text, but to refresh them for a new audience. One might think of the 1940s Rathbone version of an updated Sherlock Holmes foiling Nazis. Or so I imagine the spiel was. In any case, this episode works well. It is transposed from Montmartre to Helsinki. That means Maigret must work with and through a translator, and the few Finns who speak French do so slowly with a word-order syntax. Thank you very much.
In the novel the above-suspicion art dealer is Dutch, but here he is Swedish, perhaps, to play on Finnish prejudices about big brother. Once again a German with a murky wartime past is inserted into the plot who is not in the book. In the 1990s I would guess that the noticeable tinge of hostility to Germans is in the producers not in the audience of the day.
Again, now that Maigret is in far Helsinki there is no team, but only the telephone which is put to much use since all the persons of interest have French connections. It takes an hour to make a call to Paris, and the reception is terrible. Plus there is that long distance lag and echo in the voices. Remember that?
Once again Cremer is fine as Maigret, slow, persistent, and motivated since Lognon is a brother-in-arms, though a secretive one with a chip on his shoulder. To capitalise on the location shooting, a second film was done in Finland.
Yes, I read this book, too, and in neither the book nor the film is the title quite explained. The woman who paints upstairs before the windows once wears a white robe to mislead Maigret. Did she ever do it before? Or did the mad and bad Igor wear it? But the red-headed Englishman was the shooter.
Answers in the comments below.
Having a spent a few days in Helsinki years ago, in this film I enjoyed some of the streetscapes, waterfront, and art deco architecture, but got no glimpse of those giants that guard the central train station.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 28 minutes, rated 7.6 by 95 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi.
Verdict: Shrouded.
A one-man flying squad of Maigret arrives at the crossroads where he spends a long night, well, several of them. The film is atmospheric, much of it at night on a flat plain where there are three dwellings around the intersection, each about on a hundred metres apart in a triangle: the garage/petrol station with house, the salesman’s new and modern – circa 1947 – villa, and the weathered, brooding gothic mansion. At the petrol station is the garrulous proprietor and his taciturn wife along with a spiv and a pensioner to do the work. The salesman lives with his scowling wife in that villa. At the mansion is the sou-less Baron and his sister. These latter two are German, and the baron was disfigured in the war on the Russian Front.
The only interaction among the three is at the petrol pump. The salesman uses a lot of fuel on his calls, while the Baron drives to Paris once a month in a rattletrap to deliver his latest designs and get paid. The sister is seldom seen at all. The wife watches the crossroads from her perch in the kitchen window. The garage proprietor is the only one out and about, here and there at all hours. Trucks taking produce to Les Halles pass at all hours of the day and night, many stopping for petrol and a few words.
The Carrefour des Trois Veuves is so named for the three widows who once lived in the mansion and who, according to local legend, murdered each other (no doubt in a quarrel over the TV remoter having no man to hog it). It is late autumn with leafless trees, damp and dank air, and waterlogged fields, stretching away. The soggy, foggy atmosphere is well-rendered. (It was filmed in Luxembourg.)
Maigret has arrived because a Belgian diamond merchant has been found shot to death at the crossroads. Later when she arrives his widowed wife, too, is shot dead. The NRA hunting season is in full swing, targeting Belgians rather school children this time. Per his normal modus operandi Maigret moves into a nearby auberge and walks about absorbing the ambience, meeting the people of the crossroads who number no more than eight. Both the wives bear husband-inflicted bruises about which he asks, only to be fobbed off by the women.
It is a different set up from the book. The biggest difference in all of three films I have seen so far is the removal of Maigret from Paris and the second most significant is the absence of his team: Lucas, Janvier, LaPointe, and Torrence. Lucas is the dogged 2iC with an encyclopaedic memory for files; Janvier supplies the muscle assisted by Torrence, and young LaPointe is the fresh face who is good at getting people to talk to him. None have surfaced in these episodes to date. Tant pris.
In the book the foreigner is Danish and no baron, but remains a struggling artist with his sister. The sister is played by an actor who married a baron and perhaps that generated the idea of titling the brother. Though why he is made a German is anyone’s guess, and it jars since the Maigret books seldom (never?) refer to the wider context. Bruno Cremer once again brings Maigret to life. Slow, uncertain but persistent, surprised but steadfast he ploughs on.
In the film there much more gunfire than one expects from a Maigret title, and I read the novel to see if it is there, too. Yep Maigret in a very un-Maigret gesture does shoot a hole in an inner tube in the garage to see what is inside it. Yes, there is shoot ‘em up in the book as in the film. By the way, he carries the gun in his coat pocket! Not NRA recommended.
The Baron is so obsessed by his sister/wife that he tries to protect her, even knowing she conspired in his attempted murder by gunshot and later herself tried to smother him with a pillow. A moth to the flame is he. Will she be lucky the third time?
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.6 by 74 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Convoluted.
Between assignments, Maigret is on a busman’s holiday staying in Cannes at a de luxe hotel by the invitation of its manager, an old friend from Paris, and while there….! A cadaver appears in elderly M. Owens’s bathtub in room 412 and Owens is nowhere to be found. The deceased is a young man, while the missing Owens is an aged cripple. The local inspector barges in and throws his bantam intellectual weight around, seizing on the obvious, overlooking the subtle, while the bemused Maigret looks on.
There is a wanna-be starlet throwing herself and francs around, a sinister-looking doctor who is impossibly handsome, a demure nurse to M. Owens, a blind masseuse, an oily art dealer, and more. The ingredients are many and spicy.
Of course, as viewers realised long before the local plod, it was Owens in the tub. The Marcel Proust rugged-up invalid-look was a disguise for a young art forger whose value seems to have been eroded by his drug addiction, and his accomplices doubted his continued silence, so they ensured it. The nurse was not as she seemed, as the blindman told Maigret, her perfume is that of a rich woman, not a servant. Her transformation from dowdy to chic is good but not as convincing as a Cinderella turn by Isabelle Adjani. (I don’t remember which of her films but it was remarkable.)
Then there is the dog.
The plot is so complicated it required a lengthy expository scene at the end and I still didn’t get it. There is a neat scene midway through where Maigret overhears a private conversation through the air conditioning ducts, but nothing is made of it later.
This story derives from a Simenon short story which I found online and read. It differs from the screenplay. Much simpler, though still cryptic. The film is full of gratuitous red herrings, a veritable school of them, absent from the story. The blind man, the starlet, the art dealer, and more are not in the story but added in the screenplay. They certainly colour the tableaux, but I found the plot incomprehensible even after the explanation. Of the additions, the blind masseuse is the most interesting, while straining credulity.
I rather think the production company hastily beefed up the short story to do a second film while on seaside location for Maigret and the Liberty Bar, a superior film.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 31 minutes, rated 7.5 by 88 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: languid.
Chief Inspector Jules Maigret is plucked from his Paris office on the Ile de la Citè and put on a train to Antibes in the far south. He arrives from a grey and wet Paris, exhausted by the journey, to a blinding sunshine and the gusting mistral as though landing on another world. He is dazzled, disoriented, and overdressed, and not particularly happy to be there. He finds the local inspector a tiresome puppy underfoot and sidelines him, leaving him petulant but obedient.
Monsieur Brown, hero of the Resistance, has been murdered and someone in the national government wants a quick and clean resolution that does not open old wounds. To investigate Maigret sheds the puppy and immerses himself in Brown’s milieu, and what a milieu it is. There is a rather grand seaside villa, all that remains of Brown’s pre-war fortune when making money seemed important to him, now occupied by a mother-daughter combination, one being his mistress, and at times Maigret is not sure which, or even if both. Inside the villa it is a dump: the three lived in a few rooms, which had not been cleaned or tidied since the Liberation.
After his slow and patient questioning, the resident women say that Brown went off on holidays of three or four days every month, claiming to have no idea where he went or what he did, though he always returned with some money to live on the for the next month.
The local puppy-plod had settled on these two residents as the culprits and went no further but the lugubrious Maigret sets out to retrace and re-live the last of Brown’s short holidays. In nearby Cannes he finds the garage when Brown parked his car during these sprees, and then he bar hops in the neighbourhood until he finds the Le Liberty Bar, which like Brown fell into dilapidation after the war. Dark and seemingly empty, Maigret walks through the bar and into the kitchen to find the occupants who matter of factly offer him a seat at the table where they are just finishing lunch and he joins them, sitting where Brown sat, he learns, for it is here that Brown spent those days away. The proprietor is an older woman whose sole tenant is a young prostitute. At times others, like a waiter from the casino, come by for a drink or a meal and likewise sit at the table in the back like family.
Soon Maigret, still befuddled by the constant long hours of sunshine and the disturbance of the mistral, slowly acclimatising to the warmth of the Midi, goes into orbit around the Liberty Bar and slowly unpicks the stories of each of its inhabitants. Maigret is unhurried, annoying his impetuous colleague who wants to arrest the two residents of the villa, but Maigret stalls. He probes occasionally, but mostly watches and listens. Pascale Roberts as Mado, the owner of the bar, gives a superb performance of increasing complexity. She differs from the woman described in the novel but who cares.
Brown was Australian and his family intrudes into the affair in search of a will for it seems there is a fortune (from the sheep’s back) tied up in a business which provided Brown the monthly income he collected on his away-days. This seems a promising lead and Maigret examines it. Another red herring is the Bar’s prostitute and then her pimp. But whatever road Maigret takes it always leads back to the Liberty Bar.
* * *
There is much eye-candy of the Riviera. Finding the film diverting, I wanted to read the novel and ordered it on my Kindle while watching and started to read it later that night. Is that convenient or what!? The script sticks very closely to the text, though there is more explanation on the page than on the screen.
Such a change of pace from AmerBrit shouting and shoot ‘em ups that pass as mysteries. The placid Cremer moves at a snail’s pace, studies one scene from several angles, and soaks up the ambience in silence. Needless, to say some of the addled commentary on IMDb finds this ruminative approach inert, whereas I find it inviting. Among the many incarnations of Maigret, Cremer ranks high. Moreover, these are lavish productions with plenty of enhanced sets and artefacts of the Post War era. For the interiors the rooms are fully furnished; the automobiles are the real thing and so are the clothes. This story has been filmed at least three before according to the IMDb.
There is also an absence of the cheap cynicism that substitutes for thought in so many krimis. If shouting is the Amer disease in cop shows, the Brit disease is cynicism in which everyone is evil at heart except the paladin, think saintly and sanctimonious Christopher Foyle or Vera Stanhope who are both holier than all other thous. In contrast, Maigret meets many ordinary people who do not all harbour deep and very dark secrets and he gets to know and like some of them, including some thieves, pimps, and lowlifes who eke out a living doing little harm to others.
Another BritAmer crutch missing from the Maigret screenplays is the interfering, pettifogging, incompetent superior getting in our hero’s way. This trope has been worn so thin it is see-through and yet remains commonplace. Indeed, it has spread to krimis beyond the English language. The otherwise admirable Martin Beck Swedish series has featured a number of such cardboards. Regrettably, I note this stereotype appears in one of the Maigret episodes.
Nor is Maigret always right. He makes mistakes, he cannot always find the decisive evidence even when he is certain what happened, and in at least one of the novels he is stymied and gives up the investigation without a conclusion, thinking that maybe later something will emerge and he can start again. Equally, he does not always have the last word. In one of the stories when he is questioning the widow of a man just murdered, he says to her that her husband was engaged in a crime. She shows him her Auschwitz tattoo and say ‘That is a crime, Mr Policeman!’ That the husband was fencing stolen jewels was nothing; rebuked, Maigret went silent. (Yes, he did go the morgue later and find a similar tattoo on the cadaver of the husband.)
This is episode 2 of season 7 of the series that ran from 1991 to 2005 with Bruno Cremer in the eponymous role. There are 54 episodes in total. I have about half of them lined up on the Plex server. (The others aren’t available at this time.) The original plan had been to complete the oeuvre of all 85+ Simenon stories featuring Maigret, instead time and tide caught up with Cremer from all that pipe smoking and throat cancer killed him. It has a parallel in the effort to do the complete Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett which was likewise stymied by the disintegration of the lead.
