Category: Film Review

IMdB meta-data is 42 episodes (for all three seasons) of 90m each, rated 7.6 by 1067 cinematizens.  

Genre: krimi, species Christie.

Verdict: Delicieux!  

Season Two is set in the 1950s to the mid-1960s, specifically after 1954 because that is when the très moderne Facel Vega coupé automobile driven by one character came (briefly) on to the market. The ensemble cast includes the dumb blonde in the office, the super cop, and the ambitious and impetuous journalist. It is set in Le Nord, near, but not in the city of Lille. There is plenty of the rain for which the North is famous.

Supercop learns to appreciate the goodhearted simplicity of the blonde secretary who painfully types his reports, exploits a journalist’s youthful fearlessness to blunder into situations, and they in turn appreciate his tenacity in ferreting out la verité, as Maigret would say.

The plots are derived from Agatha Christie, some from the Tommy and Tuppence sequence, others from Dame Marple, and Monsieur Poirot, aussi, but re-potted into French soil, and given a French twist.   

While Supercop is a man of many talents, we are spared a backstory and he does not have a painful private life (so trivialised in most cop shows). Indeed, he seems to have little private life at all but he does like slamming up crims.  

The redheaded journalist has two first names, Alice Avril, and provides the energy. Marlène the secretary is the emoting and emotional sounding board, while Supercop is the electronic brain. Together they are a kind of family of siblings. He is the older brother who enjoys teasing and tormenting the younger sister journalist, while ignoring the older clothes-horse secretary whose head is full of romantic nonsense from women’s magazines. 

Loved the episode where he got a mobile phone in 1954.  Yep, a war surplus US Army field telephone the size of a suitcase, which he carried around only to have the Telecom reception drop out at crucial moments. Very realistic. Minitel would have to wait.  

Although many changes have been made from the sources, the villains remain the same, in so far as I recall the Dame’s stories. When the ghosts appear in Silent Witness, no effort is made to offer a Cartesian explanation, Horatio.  

The touch is light, the movement is brisk, the dialogue sparkles, the villains are ever so polite, though too often the immediate effort to avoid an investigation by labelling the death a suicide or an accident is clumsy and irritating. The worst example is the L’affaire Prothero. Memo to script writers, stop messing about and let the team get on with it.  Though in that episode the victim is so repellent we could hardly wait for his demise.  

On the other hand, there are occasional dream sequences that are a hoot, as when the journalist is confronted by a dissatisfied and armed reader! (Dare we hope Rupert Moloch has such dreams?) When Marlène gets carried away in a romantic revery straight out of the women’s magazines she devours every day. Or when Supercop realises he cares about each of them and recoils in horror because his armour has rusted. Then there is the singular appearance of his anti-Cartesian mother, the mystic. More mère, please.   

The tomboyish journalist has some Cinderella transformations.

There is also some superb acting when the script calls for it. The episode when it seems Marlène has been murdered elicits terrific performances from both Supercop and Journalist as they realise how much they loved her for all her genial incompetence. And Marlène plays a double role as herself and her dowdy, miserable sister. Chapeaux! A reverse Cinderella. Even more memorable is one character actor who says not a line, but the guilt, fear, and shame that cross her face are remarkable in two short scenes.  

Anachronisms, there a few.  In one episode a school teacher remarks in passing that she is ’gay.’ Surely no school teacher in 1954 would publicly to admit to being a lesbian to anyone, still less a police officer, though Marlène’s stupefied reaction is of the time and place.  

Seasons One and Three are set in different time periods with different casts, and from a brief look they do not appeal to me.  Each season had six episodes but this team was so popular more and more were made over the years to a total of twenty-seven. Season One is set in the 1930s and Three in the latter 1960s.

These are available on You Tube with subtitles. As always with You Tube, it is best to be quick. There are indications that more have been made and the search has begun. Some episodes can be found subtitled on DVD called (Agatha Christie’s) Criminal Games.  Good luck.  

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 31 minutes of runtime, rated 7.6 by 78 cinematizens.  

Genre: Krimi, sub-species: Maigret.

Verdict: Different. 

Set-up:  Maigret is about to go on vacation with his colleague Inspector Vaimber and the latter’s brood, when an odd inquiry arrives.  To handle it, Vaimber will have to put off his departure, disappointing his wife and numerous children. Knowing that Madame Maigret was not that keen on a fishing holiday, Maigret volunteers to look into the matter so that Vaimber can continue with his clan.  

Thus, Maigret meets the enigmatic Madame Quatre, so called for the room number of her hideout in a boarding house.  Her two tweenage boys are a brat pack of the first rank. She has fled the family home with them after seeing – she claims – the corpse of woman on the floor of the conservatory late one night while her very, very handsome husband was digging in the garden.  

What follows is more Hitchcock than the usual Maigret.  First and foremost is the ambiguity of Madame Quatre, played with screen-cracking intensity by Marianne Basler. Did she see what she said that she saw?  Is she perhaps the villain, shifting the blame on to her husband, who now has himself vanished?  Has he become her victim?  Is she the villain?  Slowly the mystery peels away.  

To find out, stretching credulity, Maigret goes undercover taking a room at the boarding house.  The atmosphere and inhabitants of the house conjure that the Henri-Georges Clouzet classic L’assassin habit au 21 (1942). Ensconced Maigret observes Madame Quatre unobtrusively (as if this bear of a man could be anything but obtrusive).  

Maigret is outside his milieu and on his own to protect her and the children while ascertaining the truth of the matter. As he follows her narrative it seems ever more credible despite the lack of tangible evidence, but then he draws back, is he succumbing to a folie à deux?  Has he become infected by her psychosis?  She is so very convincing because she is so very convinced herself but is that enough? To gain some distance he brings another, younger officer into the house and this latter’s questions snap Maigret out of his trance. In this story he is even more passive than usual.  

For three-quarters of the film, we just don’t know whom to believe and neither does he. Both the body count and the tension rises. Nor are we quite sure whether there will be another victim, or who it might be, until ….  The villain emerges from the fish tank.  Well, sort of.  

The direction by Phillippe Berenger is excellent. Even the staircase contributes to the plot when the ankle bracelet is spotted. The screenplay is twisted but sustains interest, and the obvious turns out to be true all along. The number “4” is crucial in a way.  If it had been done by Claude Chabrol the cinemaistas would be shouting it from the rooftops.  

I cannot identify the title of the original Simenon work (short story or novel). Maigret Takes a Room is not it.  

Dominique Roulet is credited with writing dialogue whose work from other films is excellent.  I wonder if this was an original story?  She did the adaptation of eight of the films in this Maigret series. The screen credit is ambiguous in the attribution about whether it is an adaptation or an original.   

P.S.

I have watched several others upon which I may comment later.  I have been watching one each evening when the Plex server performs as advertised. Have given up watching the TF2 news for a while as a relief from the daily dose of murder and mayhem, preferring to get my French lesson filtered through these films for a while. So as not to forget these others include: 

Maigret et la vente à bougie (1995) – the cat deals with two mice when the candle goes out.  

Maigret en Finlande (1996) – more images of watery Helsinki.  Why the pipe smoker has a cigar at one point while staring definitely at Maigret is lost on this viewer.   

Un Meutre de première classe (1999)  – didn’t make use of train. The noisey consul disappears without explanation as above suspicion. The closed world of the railway carriage is dissipated in both screenplay and direction. Tant pis.

Maigret dans un jardin potager (1999)  – intense but cryptic. Superb acting from the two warring sisters and for once a uniformed officer gets some dialogue.    

Maigret chez les riches (2000) – credibility snapped. How murder saves the family name is lost of most viewers.  

Maigret et la croquese de diaments (2001) with the great Michael Lonsdale as a red herring. Set in a canal lock near Belgian border but makes little use of it.  Strangely enough the credits cite Lonsdale as Michaël with an umlaut that his name did not have. And, yes, he is ‘Michael’ and not ‘Michel.’  He appeared in an earlier episode which I watched out of order, and in the credits for that one, his name was correctly rendered.  

Maigret et le marchand de vin (2002) – skips basic police procedure, does not question the maid, and accepts that no one recognises or thinks to mention the fired accountant. Contrast to others beating witnesses, his approach is softly, softly.  

Maigret et la princess (2002) – Maigret at his best as detective and as a person.  From the novel Maigret et les vieillards (1960), which title more accurately reflects the story. Slowly he comes to realise what motivates the occupants of the mansion. It was all so obvious that he did not notice it at first.   

Maigret et la demoiselle de compagnie (2004)  – from the short story La Vieille dame de Bayeux, in which a cardboard judge obstructs Maigret and then does a volte face to stay within running time. The sleazy villain is played perfectly.  

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. 

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 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. 

IMDb meta-data is runtime 16 m 15 s, rated 6.8 by 13 cinematizens.    

Genre: Sci Fi

Verdict: Dystopia is so yesterday.    

A SyFy short from DUST filmed mid-winter in a bleak Bulgaria where tweenagers beat each other to death to control population growth. Reminds of some Saturday morning television competitive game shows. It doesn’t make sense but there it is.  

Not on the IMDb. Too bad, because it is well made even if the plot is obvious.  I did find a Facebook page according to which the production is Australian. Its premier was in Sydney at 2021 Flickerfest with these production credits, Director and writer: Nik Kacevski and Producer: Christopher Seeto.  

I checked IMDb again and since my first check, it has been added, hence the meta-data above.

While I watched this sitting at my desk, I would have disliked paying to watch it and being trapped in a theatre. I got film festivals out of my system a long time ago, and glad to remain free of that monkey.  

IMDb meta-data is a run-time of 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated 6.6 by 1,200 cinematizens.  

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: The aliens are among us.    

To sum up, it is detached and indifferent, off-set by the eye-candy of provincial France which makes a nice change from either Paris or Marseilles.  The plot is neat but the direction is lethargic.  

Some marvellous Claude Chabrol images, especially of Bernadette LaFont; in opening and closing shots she appears as beautifully lifeless as a butterfly pinned to a card under glass. That she is so emotionally remote is a Chabrol meme, but in this film she has competitors. The household where the action is largely confined is as lively as a wax works. Though they are oddballs for the sake of being odd (and not to move the plot), they are largely inert. 

Then for we trolls there is Lavardin’s bottomless suitcase from which he extracts an endless wardrobe of suits, sport coats, and neckties to put on under the ever-present trench coat. He always looks like he just stepped out of a glossy magazine advertisement and just about as animated. That coat is a parody of the genre from Chabrol, one worn thin with repetition.  

The only life among the ensemble is projected by the sleazy nightclub owner who gives the imbeciles what they what at a premium and the wanna be blackmailer. These two actors inhabit their parts with conviction. Everyone else is so cool and remote as to be different lifeforms.  

Lavardin insinuates himself into the household rather as Maigret would’ve done, but then proceeds to break the china in a way Maigret would not. Moreover, the insertion is automatic and not an accomplishment. No sooner does the inspector appear than he is a guest at the table.  

The idea that Jean Poiret as Lavardin could be a tough guy in the Jean Gabin mould stretches the suspension of disbelief too far.  Snap! He is trop petit et beau for such muscle. Gabin had iron in his soul and it showed on camera, but not this greying pretty boy with designer suits.    

Even more tiresome, Lavardin shows no insight as a detective and is completely surprised by the denouement, but that in no ways dents his smug egotism. That is Chabrol irony, I suppose but it is not very entertaining.  He seems to be degrading the very coin he is spending.  

There was a time when Chabrol could coax some powerful performances from actors and that made his reputation. It was said that he treated the actors as in-role from the start on and off the set.  If I was playing Max, he would call me Max, even at the bar after work. And his treatment would match the character of Max.  

Ditto for L’escargot noir (1988): IMDb overrated 6.9 by 57. While the magnetic Stéphane Audran is listed in the credits and that was enough for me, she has two scenes near the end.  Why bother with such a great player for that.  Hrrumph!  No one in this outing takes the roles seriously, though once again the plot is ingenious and once again, despite his posturing, Lavardin misses the point entirely, even when holding the clincher in his hand, even after a disturbing scene with a grandmother in a church that seems out of place; was it an editing error? It had been obvious from the first 30-minutes who had to be the villain. Once again his suitcase is bottomless. Once again the charms of provincial France are on display.  Once again the viewer leaves the table hungry.  

Double ditto for Maux croisés (1989) rated 6.9 by 10 members of the director’s family, which limps, though the plot idea is neat, the execution is woeful. None of the players take it seriously and the sumptuous spa hotel is barely exploited. The guilty parties might as well have signs pinned on, and the background game show makes even less sense.  Once again the bottomless suitcase is there. One scene is simulated in a rainy Firenze and many of the players speak French with an Italian accent.  

The last was first. I watched last the first instalment of Inspector Lavardin, Cop au Vin (Poulet au vinairgre) (1985), run time of 1 hour and 50 minutes, rated 6.6 by 10 cinematizens. That viewing sequence wasn’t intentional, just the way they came up on the Plex server at home. This one certainly shows the old Chabrol in the first mysterious 45 minutes or so, and offers some splendid performances, one from Stéphane Audran, as an obsessive, manipulative mother of a young man, played by Lucas Belvaux, who is also very well drawn in what was a difficult part to play. Lavardin applies the vinegar in beating a boy and a pensioner to show he is tough, always confident no one will hit back, hiding behind to his police identity card and the director’s assurances. The bottomless suitcase is there.  Others are so tolerant of his violence and enigmatic remarks that they must have been well paid. Some characters seem crucial and then disappear. 

By the way, the musical scores were a major plus in all four episodes.  

Provincial France as shown in these films is whiter than white. Not a hint of tint of the Maghreb is to be seen. Not even a colonial* restaurant is passed in the streets.   

All in all, I was disappointed by the four DVDs. True, there were excellent moments, but like Wagner operas they went on and on and those moments became fewer and farther between. Chabrol’s own obsession with ridiculing the provincial bourgeoisie seems adolescent.  Likewise his contempt for his own character, Lavardin, the lone ranger, who comes out of the mists, wreaks violence, and leaves is very spaghetti western without the parody, wearing thin quickly.  A Maigret he is not.      

P.S.  It is unorthodox in that Flics are usually portrayed in film as fools (Louis de Funès), corrupt thugs (Gérard Depardieu), or square-jawed defenders of the Republic (Jean Reno). I leave the redoubtable Jules Maigret and his many incarnations in a separate and singular class.  

* The first time I patrolled the food floor of the Galerie Lafayette in Paris in 1980, there was a section labeled ‘Cuisine coloniale’ where a few items from IndoChina (rice) and North Africa (harissa) were displayed.  

IMDb meta-data is 11 episodes of 48 minutes each. Ratings are below.

Genre: Hard Boiled.

Verdict: An intoxicating cocktail of cynicism and optimism.

These titles from the second season came my way:

Blackmailers Don’t Shoot rated 7.4 by 53 cinematizens,

Spanish Blood rated 7.2 by 32 cinematizens,

Pick-up on Noon Street rated 7.4 by 34 cinematizens,

Guns at Cyrano’s rated 7.2 by 30 cinematizens,

Trouble is My Business rated 7.5 by 35 cinematizens, and

The Red Wind rated 7.5 by 30 cinematizens. 

From the typewriter of Raymond Chandler this series adapts some of his early short stories for the screen.  A few of these early stories featured Mallory before the gestation of Philip Marlowe in print, but Marlowe has been retrofitted into these scripts. (Word to the wise: the entry on Wikipedia is not useful for the early days of Marlowe.) These are episodes from the second season. My efforts to locate the first series have not (yet) been successful. 

In these outings Marlowe is (retrospectively) the Marlowe of The Big Sleep, tough and cynical, incarnated by Powers Booth (1948-2017), the only Marlowe I have seen who has the bulk, with added jowls and a vocal rasp from all those cigarettes and scotch. Some cluey aficionados rank him as the #2 Marlowe after Bogart. Could be. That’s one toss I won’t argue.

Taken together in these episodes what I noticed is the racial themes in Spanish Blood and Pick-up on Noon Street, and I wondered how closely that aligned with Chandler’s original stories, or was it the production company, HBO, beating the virtue drum?  I don’t recall anything about either Latinos or Blacks from Chandler’s stories, except in the background as gardeners or drivers, maids and servants.  Make of that what one will.  I may have to re-read these stories myself for a refresher.  

There is also a recurrent motif in that the victims of a crime had contrived the crime to gain publicity in the dream factory town, where publicity is oxygen, where if you are not going up then you are going down on the popularity gauge, because someone else is going up on it. That seemed surprisingly current given the great desire of so many people to be victims. 

My personal favourite from this half-dozen is The Red Wind. Its evocation of the Santa Ana wind is a malevolent character in the wings, just off camera, in this drama. It precipitates actions, explains method, and drives the momentum.  If anything this is even more effective on film than on the page. Maury Chaykin, before he went straight and became Nero Wolfe, is as repellant as a Republican Senator, lazy, stupid, corrupt, and greedy.  He positively drips malice off the screen onto the carpet in front of the television. Yuk! (Note he is not in the story but an addition for the screen play and wonderful.) While the screenplay retains all the convolutions, for unknown reasons it changed the context to a political campaign, as was the case also in Spanish Blood. It also changed the colour of the bolero jacket that is crucial to the plot. Change for the sake of change is not limited to management.  

The staging is for television, slow and methodical and that allows for Marlowe’s worldweary voiceovers.  I went shopping for Season One but cannot find it in any of the usual locations. Odd that.  

It is also striking that a man-eating femme fatale is the pivot in all of these stories.  Did Chandler fear women that much.  It sure seems it watching these in a row.  Moreover, the women, though played by different actors, bear a resemblance to each other, but I put that down to the preferences of the casting director for the willowy athlete.  The only one miscast is the lead in Red Wind: The camera looks right through her.  (Every time I encounter this story I react to Marlowe’s closing speech on the pier. It seems ill judged to me. Maybe the flyer could only afford the pearls he bought and dreamed of replacing them sometime with the real thing.  But Marlowe has no truck with dreamers.)

It offers plenty of eye candy with period dress, automobiles, and much location shooting of the vanishing 1930s Hollywood and, more generally, Los Angeles. Love those California Spanish mansions, and the tropical foliage (in which lurk deranged rapists, murderers, black-widow spider women, and drug-addled teenagers).  The cigarette smoking is constant by one and all, as it was then.  Most of all there is the light, the sun, the blue sky above all the depravity.  Sunshine Noir as this style came to be called is aborning in these stories, and some of the quips are gold, if ephemeral, perhaps that is fool’s gold that flashes in the sunlight.   

The user reviews on IMDb are replete with pedants picking errors in the models of cars, street addresses, and other, like essentials. Keeps the trolls busy, anyway.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 17 minutes, rated 8.2 by 6 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Charming.

Somewhere in a Latvian potato field Aldis talks to the plants, commending them on their endurance, praising their versatility, luxuriating in their foliage, and cheering them on. This potato field is his canvas, his work, his mission, his wife, his dog, his life. Then one night he sleeps through the crash of an alien spaceship into his field of dreams!  Well, farm work is tiring, making him a heavy sleeper and he missed the impact only to awaken to a loud knock at the door.  

Next thing he knows the long arm of Riga has reached out and evacuated him from his property while the downed spacecraft, which he is told is a weather satellite, is secured. The government offical who moves him is Arn from Prince Valiant working a second job.  Aldis plots with two friends, a married couple, that he stays with while his farm is fenced off for study, to get back among those tubers, because they cannot do without him, nor he without them. The trio try several ruses in good fun to get in, from movie making to a tourist walk through the potato field but the guards will not open the gate to either the costumed film crew or the ersatz tourist.    

Desperate, Aldis goes in via a wormhole burrowing under the fence, and finds a great silver potato (looked like that bean in Chicago to me, but not that big, things in Chicago have to be too big). He politely knocks on the door and it opens wherein he finds an injured alien from Area 51. They communicate, sort of, a mutual goodwill.  All Aldis has is a bag potatoes he just picked and he offers one to the alien. Offer accepted, and the alien bites in, and starts to feel better immediately. Aldis is surprised but he know his potatoes are good.  

Aldis goes back to his potatoes and the alien takes off, disappointing Official Arn before he can use the alien technology to make Latvia great (again).  After haranguing Aldis and his two co-conspirators…he asks for some potatoes to take home!

The slow smile from Aldis is charming, as is the whole deal.    

P.S. We are left to infer that none of the officials bothered to knock.