There have been a handful of directors, notably Clouzot, Delannoy, Kurosawa and Claude Miller who have taken the 'police procedural' to new heights and transcended the genre. To this select group can be added Costa-Gavras for his astonishingly assured directorial debut 'Compartiment Tuers'.
This technically virtuosic and gloriously inventive piece is impressive enough by any standards but Costa-Gavras has here taken the giant leap from assistant to fully-fledged director with consummate ease.
He has the good fortune of course to have the services of simply superlative talent both in front of and behind the camera and great material with which to work, based as it is on the novel by Sébastian Japrisot who is renowned for 'subverting the rules of the crime genre'.
This film is a heady mix of policier, film noir and mystery thriller with a sprinkling of black humour and succeeds as both homage to and spoof of those genres.
The cast comprises some of France's finest and one has to mention Yves Montand who shows a new maturity here with his greatest roles still to come, not only for this director but also for Claude Sautet.
A first film can be make-or-break and here Costa-Gavras is setting out his stall and declaring "Here I am!" Luckily for us, here he stayed.
