"The Yellow Dog" is not one of Simenon's finest Maigret novels. The premise involving four drinking buddies getting killed off one by one in the moody port town of Concarneau - their murders heralded by the appearance of a large yellow dog - is highly promising, offering a great opportunity for gothic thrills and pseudo-supernatural chills. But Simenon is not John Dickson Carr and while he is a master of psychology, mystery has never been his forte. Thus "The Yellow Dog" gets bogged down in increasingly more ludicrous plot twists until the disappointing revelation which feels more like a cheat than a surprise.
But the real surprise is that Aleksandr Vizir's utterly obscure 1994 "Hostages of Fear", manages to adapt this novel into a genuinely moody little thriller, a film low on action but absolutely dripping in atmosphere and angst in a way only Russians can make 'em.
The general story still remains the same. A small town (here represented almost entirely by a single inn) is gripped by fear due to the mysterious murder of a jolly local drunk (Valery Panarin). When his drinking buddies start getting killed off as well, one of the party, the dissolute Dr Michoux (Romualdas Ramanauskas) tries to hide away from his destiny in the local inn where he is haunted by the figure of a large black dog. But is it fear that is turning the formerly vivacious Dr Michoux into a walking corpse or is it guilt over a long-buried secret? It is up to Inspector Maigret (Yuri Yevsyukov) to answer that particular question.
However, Vizir wisely streamlines Simenon's scattered narrative by removing all the extraneous subplots and blind alleys. He concerns himself entirely and only by the murders, immersing us into a uniquely bleak and depressing atmosphere of a small town in winter. Yes, for once, someone has made the plot of "The Yellow Dog" work, but it is really the feeling of "Hostages of Fear" that stays with you. It is a curiously dour, melancholic film in which everyone walks as if the heavy burden of depression has physically drenched their raincoats. No one seems to be having the least bit of fun in this film.
Igor Belyakov's cinematography is a large part of why this film works as well as it does. Shot almost entirely at night, the film has a kind of nightmarish quality about it, as if occurring in that weird world between sleeping and waking. It is full of muted colours, sickly greens and blood reds. Neon lights barely showing through the thick fog permeating every interior. Even the inn. Heavy backlighting makes all the characters appear like walking shadows, mysterious silhouettes hiding dark secrets. Eery French chansons play on the radio, echoing through the half-empty inn like voices from the past. This is also a very slow movie, but I doubt any other pace would have worked. Still, my attention rarely wavered, held firmly in the grip of the film's surreal atmosphere.
"Hostages of Fear" does fall into several traps common for Russian films of this period. It is awfully talky even though it works so much better when it shows and doesn't tell. Almost every silent scene in the film is a gem including a tension-filled three-minute game of hide-and-seek with the main suspect in an abandoned factory and a lovely, poetic sequence involving Maigret and the dog. It also occasionally slips into the kind of grotesque that passes for humour in Russia. I never found it particularly funny, merely obnoxious. However, one thing I especially give credit to Alexander Vizir for is managing to hide the cheapness of this film. Every other low-budget Russian film from this period I've ever seen tends to resemble a bad sitcom. "Hostages of Fear" has a kind of stylishness that efficiently disguises a lack of budget.
I also very much liked Yuri Yevsyukov in the part of Maigret. He has the absolute right mixture of thoughtful taciturnity and tireless determination that are required to play the famous French detective.
In conclusion, I was really surprised by how effective "Hostages of Fear" is. Sure, like most Simenon adaptations it would play far better on television than the cinema screen where it seems just a tad too small-scale and talky, but it possesses a uniquely bleak and spooky atmosphere which even the novel lacks. In a rare turn of events, this entirely forgotten film has actually managed to be better than the book.
