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The Thin Man Goes to Vichy France, just about, though not without a lament for Paris during the Occupation. ("How the faithful city has become a harlot," recites the bogus curé at the dinner table.) It begins with a door creaking open before introducing a subjective slasher-camera for the murder of the moneyed barfly, a black glove on the hidden blade and "Monsieur Durand" on the calling card. Pierre Fresnay and Suzy Delair are the sleuthing duo at the center, he's a darting dandy out of Conan Doyle and she's a would-be soubrette waiting to be discovered "like America before Columbus," a fizzy turn modeled after Barbara Stanwyck in The Mad Miss Manton. The killer's location is known but not his identity, a joke diffused through the Hitchcock of Number Seventeen in the boarding house that Fresnay infiltrates under clerical guise. The toymaker with faceless dolls (Pierre Larquey), the limping ex-abortionist (Noël Roquevert) and the fakir-artiste-gigolo (Jean Tissier) are the main suspects, though Henri-Georges Clouzot's ebullient viper's nest is freewheeling enough to accommodate a failed novelist working on a policier ("Un château hanté!"), a blind boxer with a nurse in glittering lingerie, and acerbic hints of colonial pasts. "If one returns from hell, one prefers to forget." "No one returns from hell. Cheers!" A Lubitschian sleight-of-hand at the music hall points the way, vanity proves to be the ultimate undoing, "c'est bien normal." A most slaphappy whodunit that name-checks the Vampire of Dusseldorf, a screwball wink at the beasts in an epoch of malignant suspicion. With René Génin, Jean Despeaux, Marc Natol, Huguette Vivier, Odette Talazac, and Louis Florencie. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |