This is a pretty monumental film, impressing with clarity of picture, busyness of street action and immediacy of plot development right from the start. Indeed this, beautifully photographed film engages from the beginning and roars along from scene to scene and image to image to inform in the most economical of ways before gradually slowing down as the story deteriorates into something quite terrible. Viviane Romance plays the leading lady, who is anything but, with great style but is this true love? Or is this sheer greed or even true hatred that leads to such panic. The sad, suspenseful ending reminded me of Frankenstein's monster, Quasimodo and even poor old King Kong but the true aim here by the writer Simenon in his original book is surely his own country folk and their disgraceful behaviour during WW2. Frighteningly effective cinema.

A Filmsonor Production. French release: 15 January 1947. U.S. release through Film Rights International. New York opening at the Rialto: 26 November 1947. 91 minutes. Available on an L.C.J. Editions DVD. As the copyright expired in 1997, there is also a poor Public Domain DVD kicking around with hard-to-read English sub-titles.

SYNOPSIS: When you think about it and ask yourself some key questions, the plot doesn't make a great deal of sense, particularly as (in order to throw viewers off the scent) Duvivier has Vivian Romance play a key scene with the wrong reaction.

COMMENT: Duvivier's first film on returning to France after his wartime stint in the USA (during which he made one of my all-time favorite movies, Tales of Manhattan),in this superb thriller in which the atmosphere builds slowly but engrossingly into one of the most brilliantly staged climaxes the cinema has ever seen. In the lead role, Michel Simon plays with such presence and authority that we overlook the character's many unsympathetic qualities. He is well-matched by Viviane Romance who contrives to keep us hoping that she will land on the right side in the final reel. And among the support characters, even the smallest roles are cleverly individualized. Unlike many of the previous Simenon movies, this one has been produced on a really top-flight budget. Piménoff's sets and Hayer's noirish photography are outstanding.

Duvivier, one of the all-time Great French directors, spent the first part of the nineteen forties in Hollywood where her turned out a string of first-rate movies (Lydia, Flesh And Fantasy, Tales Of Manhattan) but when he returned to his native France he did so with style and panache with this film, one of the finest French films of the forties and easily fit to stand beside such gems as Les Visituers du Soir, Les Enfants du Paradis, Adieu, Leonard, Les Portes de la nuit, etc. The source material was, once again, Georges Simenon who, at the last count, has had something like 170 films made from his vast output. Duvivier employed one of the finest French Screenwriters, Charles Spaak to adapt the story of the 'outsider' who is so easy to blame when things go wrong. Michel Simon, brilliant as ever, is doubly an 'outsider' here for in addition to being Jewish he is also eccentric and unsociable which, naturally, in the blinkered eyes of society, makes him the number one suspect for a local murder, especially when local good-time girl, Viviane Romance, lately out of the slammer and back with the piece of scum for whom she took the rap, plants incriminating evidence in Simon's flat. Set-up after set-up reeks of style and there's a nice sequence on the bumper cars in a funfair where M. Hire (Simon) is hemmed in by other cars, anticipating the climax when the crowd will surround him baying for blood and there's also a nod to an earlier Simon triumph, Boudu, in a scene shot alongside the bouquinistes that line the Seine. Patrice Leconte remade Panique as Monsieur Hire with Michel Blanc in the eponymous role and it remains a fine film but this is the version they all have to beat. A regular poster has remarked that he'd rather have this film than ten A Bout de souffles and I know what he means except he should have said Twenty. Godard is not fit to shine Duvivier's shoes.