Au nom de la loi (1932)
Directed by Maurice Tourneur

Film Review

During his decade-long stint in Hollywood, Maurice Tourneur came to be so well-regarded that he was often compared favourably with D.W. Griffith.  On his return to France in the early 1930s, Tourneur appeared to be a spent force and would rarely, in the final two decades of his career, live up to the acclaim he had earned during the silent era, when he was at his most inspired and adventurous.  There are a few films of note, however, and the first of these is Au nom de la loi (1932), a crime drama adapted from a novel by Paul Bringuier which contains the seeds of not only French film noir but also the modern police procedural drama.

As with his subsequent forays into film noir - Justin de Marseille (1935) and Impasse des deux anges (1948) - Tourneur is visibly influenced by American cinema of the time, William A. Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931) being one obvious point of reference.  Whereas much of early French film noir leans towards German expressionism - most notably Jean Renoir's La Nuit du carrefour (1932) - Tourneur's film, like Wellman's, is  anchored in everyday reality and opts for a more naturalistic approach.  With its extensive use of real locations and emphasis on banal incident, Au nom de la loi is as much a portrait of 1930s France as it is a landmark crime film - indeed it is quite possibly the most authentic exposé of French police methods committed to celluloid in this decade, shockingly so in places.

The film contains two standout sequences that would prove to be highly significant in the development of the policier genre, and not only in French cinema.  In the first, reluctant witness Gabriel Gabrio receives some rough treatment from driven inspectors Charles Vanel and Pierre Labry in an interrogation scene of the kind that would become practically obligatory in later film noir policiers.  Vanel  and Labry's relentless psychological assault includes forcing Gabrio to strip naked and ends, improbably, with Vanel offering his humiliated and defeated victim a glass of wine.  Gabrio's reaction is as unexpected as the peace-offering itself.  In Vanel's ruthless but humane Inspector Lancelot we catch more than a glimpse of those maverick cops that would leave their indelible mark on the big and small screen in later decades.

And then there is the film's great set piece - the dramatic siege at the end of the film which culminates in a fierce shoot-out and spectacular death.  It is tempting to think that Alfred Hitchcock was inspired by this sequence for his similar ending to The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).   Even here, Tourneur eschews cheap sensationalist thrills for dogged realism, and this is what makes the sequence so gripping.  Before the end, our sympathies have switched to the cornered hoodlum as he is driven ineluctably to his doom via a merciless assault by the supposed custodians of order.  The murder of a young police inspector at the start of the film is avenged with implacable zeal.  It is only then that the subtle irony of the film's title becomes apparent.

One of film noir's enduring motifs, the femme fatale, is represented by a startlingly alluring Marcelle Chantal.  This was quite a change for an actress better known for playing bourgeois types in conventional melodramas, but she never looked more glamorous, nor more brazenly sensual, than she does here, and not only in the scene where she strips down to her underwear (apparently this sort of thing is quite prevelant in French police stations).  The film prefigures film noir of the 1940s in other ways - the liberal use of low and high angle shots to add visual impact and heighten the tension, the moody lighting of nocturnal sequences and the memorably eerie sequence in an opium den, a poetic digression which shows something rarely seen in cinema of this era - the pleasurable consumption of illicit drugs.

In his most inspired and most true-to-life crime film, Maurice Tourneur lures us into the sordid world of narcotics smuggling as easily as Marcelle Chantal appears to do so with Jean Marchat, although it is his depiction of police chicanery that is more unsettling.  What makes Au nom de la loi so noteworthy for its time is that every one of its protagonists turns out to be more ambiguous, and therefore more interesting, than the noir archetypes they initially appear to represent.  The law enforcers and law breakers inhabit the same moral space, and it isn't obvious who deserves our sympathies the most in this murky shadow world of fractured certainties.  As a template for film noir, it could hardly be improved upon.

Film Synopsis

Inspector Clamart is confident that he can single-handedly deal with a drugs trafficking ring.  The next day, his lifeless body is found floating in the Seine.  His colleagues, Inspectors Lancelot and Ludovic, are resolved to bring his murderers to justice and have their first clue when a woman's glove stained with blood is found in an abandoned taxi.  Suspicion falls on Sandra, a wealthy Polish woman, but the police haven't enough evidence against her to make an arrest.  It falls to Marcel, an undercover policeman, to gain Sandra's confidence and learn to what extent she is involved with a gang of narcotics smugglers...