After the conclusion of WWII, director Henri-Georges Clouzot was banned from filmmaking in France. It was his punishment for working with Continental Films (a German-funded production company), and for the perceived anti-French attitudes conveyed in Le Corbeau (1943). It took four years and the vocal support of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau before the ban was lifted, and he was allowed to make the commercial-minded Quai des Orfèvres, adapted from the Belgian murder mystery “Légitime défense (Self Defense)” by Stanislas-André Steeman.
Clouzot was very familiar with Steeman’s work, having adapted the novel “6 Hommes morts (6 Dead Men)” into a screenplay for director Georges Lacombe (released as Le Dernier des Six in 1941) and using “L’assassin habite au 21” as the source of his solo directorial debut The Murderer Lives at 21 (1942). Producer Anatole Eliacheff was willing to back Clouzot’s comeback as long as it had box office prospects, so the crowd-pleasing Steeman was a logical source for a story. Eliacheff agreed to the idea (though he later sold the rights to Majestic Films) so Clouzot and co-writer Jean Ferry started to write the script. The only problem was that “Légitime défense” was out-of-print in France and they couldn’t find a copy anywhere. So, as Lanny Borger reported in the 2002 re-release production notes for Film Forum, they had to adapt the story from memory.
By necessity Quai des Orfèvres is one of the least faithful adaptations of a novel in film history. Aside from the character types, everything else was significantly changed. The story circles around the bickering couple of Jenny Lamour (Suzy Delair), a vivacious nightclub performer, and Maurice Martineau (Bernard Blier), a paunchy, balding piano player prone to fits of jealousy. Both are friends with their downstairs neighbor Dora (Simone Renant), a world-weary lesbian photographer who was childhood friends with Maurice and is protective of the flighty Jenny. So when Jenny is courted by Brignon (Charles Dullin in his final screen role), a sleazy businessman who promises her a movie career, Maurice blows his top. The result is a dead body with no clear indication of who committed the crime. So in walks Inspector Antoine (Louis Jouvet), an amiable open-hearted detective who is determined to see the investigation to its outcome through a variety of wild twists and turns. His avuncular personality and circuitous thought processes reminds one of Columbo.
It’s an impeccably acted ensemble led by Delair, whose performance of “Avec son tra-la-la” would become part of her permanent repertoire. (She was clearly being positioned as the star; the film was originally released under the title Jenny Lamour in the United States). Delair is total exuberance and bathed in feathers while Maurice is a gray everyman, someone you wouldn’t give a second look to when you pass them on the street. In the artfully composed compositions lensed by Clouzot’s frequent DP Armand Thirard, Suzy takes center stage while Maurice is pushed to the edges, often pounding away on a rickety old piano shoved into a corner. When his repressed rage bursts open it is a destabilizing action that shudders through the lower levels of popular entertainment they occupy, a world lovingly detailed by Clouzot and his team. This milieu is memorably described by Lucy Sante for the Criterion Collection: “Along the way are dozens of vignettes of the backstage population, the song pluggers and the elderly coat-checkers, the dog acts and the stagehands, the standees in the dress circle and the black-market procurer in the wings.”
Though he only appears in a few scenes, the “black-market procurer” Brignon’s baleful presence hovers over the film like a malignant poltergeist. He buys and sells girls like he is playing the stock market, using his immense wealth for the depths of depravity. No matter how far Jenny has risen on her own merits, there will always be vampiric men like Brignon that will shadow her path.
Quai des Orfèvres was instantly recognized as a major work, winning Clouzot the Best Director prize at the Venice Film Festival and earning praise from those who once blacklisted him.
