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.