'Un témoin dans la ville', the third feature film made in 1959 by Édouard Molinaro, begins with a scene of a murder on a train that seems taken from an Alfred Hitchcock film and ends with an anthological and original scene. Between them, in an hour and a half, we are watching one of the best French noir films and the film that launched and consolidated the character of the lone criminal, embodied by Lino Ventura here and in several other films, a character that would also be taken over by other actors and directors (French or not), some among the best.
The original script belongs to the couple of writers Boileau - Narcejac, the very successful authors of the novels of the 'noir' genre in France. Many of their books have been adapted to screens (including by Hitchcock), but here they themselves wrote the screenplay together with Gérard Oury. Ancelin, the main hero of the film commits a premeditated murder. If there are justified crimes, this would be one of them, because the victim is the one who had killed Ancelin's wife and then escaped the legal consequences because of the 'benefit of the doubt'. The crime, however, has a witness, a taxi driver who had been called by the victim a few minutes before he was killed. Ancelin doesn't know what to do. He knows that he risks going to prison for the rest of his life or maybe even to the scaffold, but he is not a born criminal and is not capable of deciding to eliminate the witness. In fact, we do not see Ancelin commit a second murder in the film. The hunter becomes the pray, as the cab driver fraternity rallies to protect their threatened colleague. The film becomes the story of an ordinary man's slide into crime and death.
That in many other cases, the quality of the film resides in the ambiguity. Ancelin is guilty of a morally 'excusable' crime (he avenges his wife and takes out her murderer who escaped justice) and it is not clear whether he intended to commit other crimes or perhaps just convince the witness to keep quiet. Everything is filmed in a Paris at night, in constant motion. Radio taxis seem to predict today's super-connected world, and scenes from the lives of taxi drivers, with the love story between taxi driver Lambert and dispatcher Liliane provide a counterpoint to the dark plot of Ancelin's revenge. Édouard Molinaro is a contemporary of the New Wave and uses some of its inventions (the mobile camera, long shots interspersed with short ones and nervously edited, Paris as a background for love stories or crimes). But he was a director who had the audience in mind, and not himself, like the masters of the New Wave. In a few years he would direct some of the best comedies with Louis de Funès. The jazz-style soundtrack belongs to Barney Wilen, and the cinematography to Henri Decaë, who would also film the masterpiece of the 'lone criminal' genre - Henri Melville's 'Le Samouraï'. Last but not least, we have to talk about Lino Ventura - the actor who carries the film on his shoulders, in the first of his great roles as a lonely hero - positive, negative or ambiguous. I invite you to watch or re-watch the film to decide which category Ancelin belongs to. It will be a satisfying viewing.
