La Nuit du carrefour (1932)
Directed by Jean Renoir

Film Review

Georges Simenon's long association with cinema began in 1931 when he took the decision to adapt one of his own novels, appropriately one featuring his famous fictional detective Inspector Jules Maigret.  In the event, he invited Jean Renoir, a director he greatly admired, to script and direct the film, but under his close supervision.  La Nuit du carrefour was the first film adaptation of a Simenon novel (it premiered in France in April 1932) and the honour of the first actor to play Maigret on screen went to Jean Renoir's older brother, Pierre.  Although Simenon was not entirely happy with the film he was so impressed with Pierre Renoir's portrayal that he intended casting him again as Maigret in a subsequent film, La Tête d'un homme, which he himself would direct.  Alas, these plans came to nothing and the latter film ended up being helmed by Julien Duvivier, with Harry Baur playing the iconic pipe-smoking 'tec.  Between these two films, Simenon gave his consent to another film adaptation of his work, Le Chien jaune (1932), with Abel Tarride in the role of Maigret, directed by his son Jean.  Since, Georges Simenon's novels have been endlessly adapted for cinema and television throughout the world, with Maigret portrayed by a remarkable roll call of actors that includes Albert Préjean, Charles Laughton, Jean Gabin, Michael Gambon and Bruno Cremer.

Being cinema's first Simenon adaptation and Maigret's first screen outing, La Nuit du carrefour occupies an important place in cinema.  Just as significant is its role in the popularisation of the film policier in the 1930s and the emergence of a distinctive style which has become intimately wedded with the genre, film noir.  Whilst it is acknowledged that film noir had its origins in German expressionism, the distinctive murky atmosphere of Simenon's novels, so perfectly captured in Renoir's film and emulated in later French films of the 1930s, was also an essential ingredient in the develepment of the noir aesthetic.  The poetic realism of Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné had its origins in La Nuit du carrefour, just as poetic realism itself would shape and influence much of classic American film noir.

La Nuit du carrefour is the least typical and perhaps most surprising of Jean Renoir's films.  It has an eerie, artificial feel that sets it apart from the realist dramas that Renoir was making around this time and seems to belong to the same stable as his previous experimental fantasies, Sur un air de Charleston (1927) and La Petite marchande d'allumettes (1928).  The film owes its unreal quality to its almost surreal setting, a nondescript no mans land situated in the void between rural and industrial France.  The crossroads of the film's title is a kind of purgatory inhabited by suspicious-looking outsiders with dark secrets to hide and where it is always night, the incessant rain and mist drenching the landscape with a mood of unremitting gloom and foreboding.  The murky setting reflects and emphasises the ambiguity of the characters that become embroiled in the most convoluted of murder mysteries, and the most ambiguous character of all is Maigret himself, played with more than a hint of menace by an actor better known for his villainous portrayals.  You would not have been the least surprised if Maigret had turned out to be the killer himself.

It is the film's intoxicating, fetid atmosphere that makes it so fascinating and absorbing.  The plot hardly makes any sense at all, and even Renoir himself admitted that he never quite understood what it was all about.  There have been rumours that reels went missing after the filming was finished, or that several of the later scenes were dropped when the money began to run out.  Certainly, there is an obvious lack of narrative clarity towards the end of the film, as just about every character appears implicated in the crime and the real culprit seems to have been chosen at random rather than by logic.  Whilst this can be incredibly frustrating for those who like their murder mysteries to have a nice tidy resolution, it does fit with the cobweb-like mystique that surrounds the film, with the objective plotting of the traditional crime novel giving way to a more subjective mode of expression that abounds with narrative trompe-l'oeils and dreamlike inconsistencies.  The confusion reaches its apogee in a dramatic car chase filmed mostly from the point-of-view of one of the drivers.  It is a completely superfluous sequence and could so easily have been cut, and yet it distils the film's haunting oneirism into one cogent summation of the entire policier genre - a frenzied contest between good and evil in which the moral boundaries are far from clear.

Today, it is too easy to overlook La Nuit du carrefour, to dismiss it as merely a crudely hewn genre film, bereft of the poetry and humanity of the timeless masterpieces that Renoir would turn out on a regular basis later in the decade.   Yet, aside from its importance as a landmark in the development of the film policier, it is also a film that has its own distinctive artistic quality.  Renoir's most unsettlingly dreamlike composition, it seems to be a complete inversion of the sunny impressionism of his father's paintings, showing us not a pretty reproduction of the surface impressions which seduce the senses and deceive the mind, but a much darker view of the uglier reality that lies beneath and which we see clearly only in our dreams.  It is on these gloomy foundations, anchored in the rank swamp of human depravity, that Renoir would go on to construct his true cinematic marvels.

Film Synopsis

At the Carrefour des Trois-Veuves, some thirty kilometres north of Paris, insurance agent Michonnet is surprised when his car is stolen.  In its place is a car belonging to a mysterious Dane, Carl Andersen, who lives with his sister Else at a nearby mansion.  After reporting the car's disappearance to the police, Michonnet finds it back in his garage, but in the front seat is the dead body of a Dutch jeweller, Goldberg.  As he investigates the murder, Inspector Maigret soon realises he is on the trail of a gang of traffickers who may or may not be connected with the Andersens.  The investigations takes an unexpected turn when Maigret discovers that Else is not Carl's sister but his wife...