Café de Paris (1938)
Directed by Yves Mirande, Georges Lacombe

Film Review

With over a hundred film credits to his name, Yves Mirande was one of French cinema's most prolific screenwriters, but his attempts at directing (limited to just ten films) are somewhat less impressive and mostly forgotten.  Café de Paris is perhaps the only film directed by Mirande that deserves being preserved for posterity, less so for its content (a traditional murder mystery in the Agatha Christie mould) and more for its vivid portrayal of high society in the late 1930s, a picture of supreme decadence mired in corruption, deceit and deadly enmity.  The glamorous setting, ostensibly the nightspot of choice for Paris's well-heeled and impeccably turned out glitterati, turns out to be a nest of the deadliest vipers and serves as an apt metaphor for a cynical class that trades on vice and suffering beneath the thinnest veneer of respectability.

In the 1930s, the whodunit was as popular a genre in cinema as it was in literature, but in Mirande's film it is almost incidental to what the film is really meant to be, a darkly humorous observation on society mores which evokes wider concerns in France at a time of immense political and economic uncertainty.  Many of the seemingly respectable figures at the prestigious nightspot turn out to be grubby arms dealers cashing in on Germany's re-armament programme ahead of WWII.  The murder victim is the most scurrilous kind of scandal monger but he probably has more social worth than the dodgy businessmen around him since he sees through the illusion and has the courage to expose the corruption that is driving France into the moral abyss (albeit for personal advantage).  Lambert's murder is symbolic and eerily prefigures the disaster that is to follow from France's complacency and lack of moral fortitude in the years immediately before WWII.  The capitulation to Nazi Germany and long years of Occupation that ensued appear inevitable after watching Café de Paris - France was a weak and divided nation waiting to be seized, just as Lambert was sure to be knifed.

One interesting point of contention about the film is who actually directed it.  Georges Lacombe probably has a greater claim to be credited as the director than Yves Mirande (he often stated that Mirande rarely showed up on the set and left him to do all the work, assisted by Robert Vernay).  The end result certainly feels more like a Georges Lacombe film than an Yves Mirande film, Lacombe being particularly adept at playing with lighting and camera angles to build tension and atmosphere, evidenced by his later films Le Pays sans étoiles (1946) and La Lumière d'en face (1955).  Vernay's penchant for striking tableaux and shadowy atmospherics is also apparent in a few scenes, prefiguring his work on Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1943).

The humour, however, is more recognisably Mirande's, and shows itself in Jules Berry's scenes, which are the most enjoyable the film has to offer (unusually the actor is cast as a sympathetic character, more than willing to offer himself up as a modern Sydney Carton when his mistress is suspected of murder).  A juvenile Pierre Brasseur is a shadow of the nasty piece of work he would become in later years but Jacques Baumer is instantly recognisable as a humourless police inspector whose work ends up being done for him by an irritatingly smug Julien Carette.  Café de Paris has next to nothing to commend it on the plot front but the brace of colourful performances brings it to life and makes it an amusing satire on a world that would soon become history, once its rotten foundations had felt the kiss of the Nazi Götterdämmerung.

Film Synopsis

One New Year's Eve the Café de Paris is host to the capital's social élite, a glamorous ensemble of the rich and famous who come together to welcome in the new year in an atmosphere that positively reeks of decadence.  But when the lights go out at midnight to allow lovers to exchange clandestine kisses a man dies in the midst of all this merrymaking.  Monsieur Lambert is the most hated man in Paris, the publisher of a scandal sheet who is known to extort money from his high profile victims.  When the police arrive to investigate the murder it seems that just about everyone had a motive for plunging a knife into Lambert's back.  Businessmen with dodging dealings, a writer with a grudge, a young man who was sent packing when he sought Lambert's consent to marry his daughter - there hardly seems to be a soul who wouldn't wish the disgraceful publisher dead.  The police get a lucky break when it is revealed that Lambert's wife Geneviève was at the high class restaurant, in the company of her lover, a man named Fleury.  At midnight, Geneviève made a sudden disappearance, and when the police find her she is at her home, busily packing her bags.  It looks as if the murderer has been unmasked, but when he learns of his mistress's arrest Fleury immediately presents himself as the killer.  A police reconstruction of the murder proves beyond any doubt that neither Geneviève  nor Fleury could have done the deed, so who did?  A journalist has the answer...