In short: Action Man (1967)

Original title: Le soleil des voyous

After a pretty successful career as a criminal (mostly in Indochina, it seems), Denis Farrand (Jean Gabin) has retired into the more or less straight life as a club and restaurant owner, married a woman who wouldn’t approve of his getting back to his old business, and is getting bored out of his mind. A plan to rob the payroll of the US forces in France is percolating in his brain – it’s one of those opportunities that just drops into a guy’s lap – but he’s not quite bored enough yet to act on it.

That changes when Farrand’s refusal to allow the underlings of the local crime bosses to sell drugs in his restaurant leads to a reunion with his old good buddy and crony Jim Beckley (Robert Stack). Which is to say, Beckley is part of the group of goons sent to convince Farrand otherwise, but obviously changes his mind on seeing his old buddy in trouble. With a partner, the whole bank and payroll thing looks too tempting to resist, particularly since Farrand’s plan is pretty great.

So great, the heist itself isn’t what goes wrong in this particular heist movie – it’s the aftermath, when said local crime bosses as well as a female partner the deeply misogynist Farrand never wanted (Margaret Lee) start making trouble that’s going to be the problem here.

The English language title for Jean Delannoy’s heist movie is pretty damn absurd – neither the now apparently touchable Robert Stack nor Jean Gabin in his 60s are any kind of action men (though giving that epithet to Gabin at this stage in his career is rather funny), and the film only has a couple of scenes that would qualify as action scenes. In truth, this is a calm, focussed and collected heist movie that stages its (pretty imaginative and fun) heist with the same precision it uses to portray an aftermath that sees the result of Gabin’s calm calculations destroyed by all of those pesky little human things like emotions and plain stupidity.

On the way, we get quite a few scenes of Gabin doing that curious Gabin thing where phlegmatic acting suddenly feels as if it were incredibly emotionally expressive, some neat variations on gangster movie standards, as well as one of the finer bloodless heists I’ve seen on screen. There’s also a thematic line running through the film – embodied in Gabin’s Farrand as well as Lee’s Betty - where boredom is the true enemy of happiness, the inability to live a boring life like everybody else (when they’re lucky) leading to doom and destruction.

In short: Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959)

aka Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case

The venerable Parisian police inspector Maigret (Jean Gabin) comes to his old hometown in the French countryside to help out the local Comtesse (Valentine Tessier). When Maigret was still a child, his father was the steward of the Comtesse’s estate, and little Maigret had a bit of a crush on the older girl; he’s now in the age where the past takes on the golden glow of nostalgia. So when the Comtesse sends him a letter asking for his help, presenting a threatening letter sent to her stating the time and date of her death, he’s obviously coming.

Even just arriving, Maigret realizes there are quite a few dubious characters around his old friend. There’s a melodramatic “secretary” and hobby art columnist, an even more melodramatic priest, and later on, we’ll also meet the Comtesse’s son, a whiny melodramatic alcoholic. Ironically enough, the Comtesse’s son will also turn out to be the murder weapon, more or less, for a fake newspaper article reporting his suicide is what’s going to kill her. Her weak, melodramatic heart, you see?

I did enjoy Jean Delannoy’s first Maigret movie with Jean Gabin, Maigret Sets A Trap quite a bit, but where that film is a psychologically insightful cat and mouse game only very slightly marred by a couple of too melodramatic performances, this one’s the embodiment of everything that was bad about French movies from the 50s, with only very little of all the things that was great about them. So the whole thing mixes a self-important, ponderous tone with finger pointing moralizing, a ridiculous murder method, and performances that consist of theatrical wallowing in badly faked emotion as expressed through stilted dialogue. It’s grating, to say the least, and certainly not improved by the film’s nostalgia for the good old days when everyone still knew their place.

The acting is made even more annoying through the immense contrast to the absurdly wonderful (given his surroundings) Gabin. For Gabin is his usual calm to phlegmatic self, expressing emotions through a slight change of tone, small shifts in his facial expression and posture - an actual actor who has somehow stumbled into a film peopled by idiots played by fools.


Technically, Delannoy’s direction is fine, full of theoretically clever little bits that would most probably be aesthetically satisfying and praiseworthy, if not for the terribly pompous air of it all, an air nothing in the script actually puts the appropriate effort in for at all. If all this sounds as if Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre has annoyed me quite a bit, I have made myself clear.

Maigret Sets a Trap (1958)

Original title: Maigret tend un piège

aka Woman-Bait

aka Maigret Lays a Trap

aka Inspector Maigret

A serial killer stalks the streets of Paris during a very hot summer, killing women regularly, always right about sunset. The killer clearly knows all of the classics, so he summons his probable nemesis, Chief Inspector Maigret (Jean Gabin), to one of the killings via an emergency call, and seems right proud of his job. Maigret, pretty tired and frustrated after twenty years of police work, has the guy pegged as a show-off right quick, so he decides on various methods to goad him, starting out with a fake public arrest of an acquainted crook, and putting a small army of police secretaries (apparently there were no other women in the French police at the time) of the physical type he’s going for on the street as honey traps.

Eventually, investigative work and a bit of luck lead Maigret to a rather curious bourgeois couple, Marcel (Jean Desailly) and Yvonne (Annie Girardot) Maurin. Something’s clearly not right with the husband, but it will take the Inspector some time and quite a bit of interview work to get his man.

When you’re like me, you’re used to the way US cinema of the late 50s had to treat elements of the human existence like sexuality, the way it could only ever suggest the facts of the lives of quite a few people without rubbing the censors wrong. In that case, the first of two adaptations of some of the immensely popular (and often rather excellent) Maigret novels of Georges Simenon might just come as quite of a culture shock, for in the French version of the 50s, the existence of gigolos is normal, the sort of thing our protagonist takes without even raising and eyebrow, and you can even use the fact that a woman is still a virgin after five years of marriage as a perfectly spelled out plot point.

These are only some of the elements that make Jean Delannoy’s film sometimes feel strangely modern. Its idea of how serial killers work is at least in part surprisingly close to the more codified interpretations of the matter that became popular knowledge years later. The film emphasizes the importance of the appearance of the killer’s victims, the connection of this to his messed up past; Maigret understands the shortening length of time between killings as meaningful, and so on and so forth. Now, these ideas weren’t completely new for crime film and literature – or psychology - at the time, of course, but they weren’t yet set in stone as pop cultural base-line knowledge about these things, nor, as far as I know, in real life. Less modern in this regard is the film blaming the killer’s mother for his problems by basically not letting him become manly enough, but you can’t have everything, I suppose.

Maigret’s interview methods are a lot closer to more modern ideas of how this sort of thing works, too, his sometimes threatening, sometimes ingratiating manner combined with psychological insight de-emphasizing the search for practical clues and replacing it with one for motive. Particularly the interrogation scenes work as well as they do because of a combination of sometimes – let’s ignore the whole blaming the mother bit – incisive and insightful writing and a fantastic performance by Gabin that starts from the actor’s trade-mark phlegmatic air but can shift emotion and meaning lightning quick. Gabin’s even good enough to help one overlook the lack of subtlety and substance in Desailly’s performance as the killer Marcel, who’s really doing too much of a rote crazy person bit for the kind of film this is. The rest of the cast is thankfully as good as Gabin.


Delannoy’s direction of all this is elegant, sleek, and stylish, without the noirish shadows one might expect (or hope for), but still creating a sense of intimacy for a film that, is all about character psychology and twisted kinds of love.