Introducing MONSIEUR LA SOURIS!
A little series of digressions about/around the film that opens MIDCENTURY MADNESS...
[MONSIEUR LA SOURIS screens February 20 in the opening show of MIDCENTURY MADNESS, our 36-film “long series” that plays at the Roxie Theater over 18 dates from February to October. Those of you in the Bay Area are particularly encouraged to visit the Midcentury Productions website to see our splendid series overview, featuring colorful poster thumbnails, IMDB links, and ticket links for the February 20 show. For those unable to attend, we hope that these essays will whet your interest in our ongoing efforts…]
Just recently at TCM, NOIR ALLEY screened Henri-Georges Clouzot’s QUAI DES ORFEVRES (1947), a highly regarded French policier that is, relative to what we do here at Midcentury Productions, too well known for us to present. (!)
But then that’s the curious thing about French noir: while a growing coterie has acquired a handle on bits and pieces of the French noir filmography thanks to Rialto Pictures’ pioneering efforts in the 1990s, there has been something akin to a brick wall in place for nearly a quarter-century in terms of going beyond their initial forays into an area that is, in fact, quite vast.
And that’s why a film like MONSIEUR LA SOURIS (English title: MIDNIGHT IN PARIS) is still languishing in obscurity along with so many other French noirs from 1932 to 1966, while other films (such as QUAI DES ORFEVRES) have become relatively common conversation pieces.
Fortunately, that situation is changing—though American audiences have not yet benefitted from the revival of so-called “heritage films” in France since the digital age became fully mature in the 2010s. (That, of course, is where we come in...)
MONSIEUR LA SOURIS, directed by the forgotten Georges Lacombe and released in 1942, is very similar in spirit to two contemporaneous films written by Clouzot: LES DERNIER DES SIX (1941), also directed by Lacombe, and L’ASSASSIN HABITE Á 21 (1942), which was Clouzot’s debut as a director.
Instead of a detective and his girl friend (Pierre Fresnay and Suzy Delair) solving murders and creating their own comic mayhem along the way, MONSIEUR LASOURIS gives us the great Raimu as a shambling, dissheveled but wily tramp (with a touching backstory revealed midway through the film) who must outwit the police and solve a baffling crime that is set up in the film’s opening minutes.
QUAI DES ORFEVRES is a very similar film to these; Clouzot had a fondness for the Belgian mystery writer Stanislaus André Steeman, and he retains a lighter tone here than was the case in LE CORBEAU (1943), the film that nearly ended his film career due to post-war accusations concerning collaborationism with the Nazis. It wasn’t until MANON in 1949 (which, by the way, was the very first film we screened back in 2014 in our still-ongoing FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT series...) that Clouzot discovered the true darkness within his cinematic vision.
With the incomparable Louis Jouvet as the police investigator, QUAI DES ORFEVRES gains some extra swagger. But Lacombe, who brought Clouzot’s first Steeman script to life, has a vibrant touch of his own and an ace up his sleeve with Raimu in MONSIEUR LA SOURIS, which might have the lightest tone of any of Georges Simenon’s romans durs (which became more darkly lurid as he grew older).
Lacombe’s characters are less over-the-top, but in MONSIEUR LA SOURIS they are as sharply observed as those we see in QUAI DES ORFEVRES. Lacombe is in that next tier of French directors whose reputations suffered as a result of the “auteurist” phase of French film criticism and the advent of the New Wave, but our forays into his filmography have shown us that when he has a good script to work with, he can turn out films that approach (and sometimes reach) the level of those more anointed.
As with many French directors, Lacombe had a long apprenticeship as an assistant (consider: Jacques Becker with Jean Renoir; Yves Allegret—he of DÉDÉE D’ANVERS and UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE—with his brother Marc). Lacombe’s mentor was René Clair; it was a seven-year association that began in the last years of the silent era. He demonstrates great promise in 1932’s UN COUP DE TÉLÉPHONE, where he handles a thorny romantic mashup with a subtle, tongue-in-cheek aplomb, but he doesn’t really hit his stride until the end of the decade via collaborations with writer-director Yves Mirande (1938’s CAFÉ DE PARIS and 1939’s DERRIÈRE LA FAÇADE, which first reveal his facility with the “lighter side” of noir).
From there it is just a short jump to his collaboration with Clouzot on LE DERNIER DES SIX and to the first film in our MIDCENTURY MADNESS series, MONSIEUR LA SOURIS.
(After that, there are his three collaborations with Jean Gabin that we will definitely bring into view in the not-too-distant future, and—awaiting a better print—the singular LE PAYS SANS ETOILES aka LAND WITHOUT STARS [1946], fervently championed by Didier Dumonteil, the great pioneering advocate of the discarded “cinema de papa”, with its brilliant trio—Gerard Philipe, Pierre Brasseur and Jany Holt—comprising a most unusual romantic triangle.)
We hope, when all our efforts are fully concluded, that Georges Lacombe will have earned a place in your memories so that when his name is mentioned, you will know it! The first step in that process begins on February 20…