Quai des Orfèvres

Released in 1947, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

If noir is realism under duress - the application of cruel pressures to all of those carefully recorded shortfalls in character that realism demands – then Quai des Orfèvres is something slightly different: the pressures are there, and cruel, but rather than reveal their flaws its characters rise above them and emerge burnished. This is noir as uplift, a reaction perhaps on the part of Clouzot to the reception of his previous film, Le corbeau, which was so scathing towards its French subjects that it was viewed as a kind of anti-patriot war crime (Clouzot himself was accused of collaboration). Quai by contrast can be taken as a portrait of the French ideal: its characters are tough-minded, communal, practical, fleshly, and humane in their worldly acceptance of varied experience. One of the characters is a gay woman, and another has a mixed-race son; both are portrayed sympathetically, and without any particular remark.

Clouzot took the plot out of a book he had read once but couldn’t really remember – that is, he knew what book it was (Légitime défense by Stanislas-Andre Steeman), and had even acquired the rights, but he couldn’t get his hands on a physical copy; a reflection of how informatically alien the past has become to us. In any case, what he came up with was conceptually standar. We begin with a sturdy threesome. Maurice (played by Bernard Blier as a puttyish, stolid secret sensualist), a gifted pianist, is married to Jenny (Suzy Delair), a gifted singer; they live above the photography studio of Dora (Simone Renant), Maurice’s childhood friend. Dora is close to Maurice, and in love with Jenny. Maurice and Jenny are in love. Maurice is pathologicaly jealous. Jenny, seductive in a bright brassy way, is both faithful and willing to take favors from men who might advance her career. There are evidently faults in this edifice, but note also its solidity. Maurice and Jenny are genuinely talented artists, who are making a go of it; the emotional tenor of their marriage is hysterical but seemingly tenable; Dora’s unrequited love is a source of melancholy, not anguish.

Enter Brignon, a lech and a movie mogul, played by French theatre legend Charles Dullin. Brignon is barely in the film, but he deserves several words because of the obscure, somewhat mystical aura of menace with which Dullin, with his extra-prehensile lips, is able to imbue him. We meet him at Simone’s studio, where he is in the habit of bringing young women. Once there he pays them to appear in nude photographs – although he instructs one to leave on her shoes. This is on the surface a relatively innocent pastime (certainly no one seems shocked by it), but Brignon’s bullying faux politesse, the controlling jocularity he uses to order around both Simone and his paid companion, indicate a motive that is closer to contempt than to desire. This is all that the script gives us to work with. The rest is with Dullin, and he makes Brignon into something of an occult figure, accursed, clad in a bulking back overcoat, his face all bones and flaps and hollowed loosenesses, muttering vicious little jokes that hint that he could, and might, do far worse. It isn’t surprising when his entry into the lives of Maurice and Jenny tips their relationship into violence; nor when his death only further upends them.

The circumstances of that death are at first laid out clearly, only to be complicated later. Jenny, trying to break into film, begins to cultivate Brignon, driving the jealous Maurice mad. He forbids that they meet; when she slips out nonetheless to have dinner with Brignon at his mansion, Maurice first goes to a music hall to establish an alibi, then slips out the back, armed and planning to kill someone, maybe Jenny, maybe Brignon, maybe them both. When he arrives however Jenny is gone and Brignon is dead – he has tried to assault her and she, defending herself, has clocked him with a bottle of champagne. Exunt Maurice, quite disturbed, convinced that his wife is the culprit. He and Jenny each hold their respective half of this story secret from the other, telling only Dora; and Dora, thinking herself the only one fully clued in, goes back to crime scene in order to clean up any evidence implicating her beloved Jenny. Even in disorder and madness the triangle continues to hold a certain coherence.

Brigon’s death brings in the film’s final major character, Inspector Antoine (Louis Jouvet), in charge of tracking down Brignon’s murderer. Jouvet at the time was a beloved icon, popular and skillful, a French Tom Hanks. His participation was what enabled Clouzot to get Quai funded, and furthermore served as a tacit signal to the public that he was now rehabilitated. Perhaps reflecting some of this circumstance, Antoine is a character bathed in warm light, his qualities configured for maximum audience sympathy. He is rumpled but classy, wise but quip-ready, good at his job but bad at playing politics, a rule breaker but he means well, a cynic with a heart of gold – morally he is like the third pot of porridge, just right. Having served in the colonial wars, he’s returned with a mixed-race son, and his paternal affection is displayed in artful, subtle touches. In short he’s a bit of a con, in a long line of cons; but this version is so singular and done with so much humor that we feel we can excuse ourselves for taking it all at face value.

Once put on the case, Antoine quickly zeros in on Maurice, Jenny, and Dora; the four of them end up in a series of standoffs, each in their own way trying to act for the greater good, but each acting only with partial information and partial trust. This lack of personal animus both softens the proceedings and increases the scope for tragedy, since if any of the four come to a bad end it will come out of meaning well.

Behind all of this plot there is immense detail and activity. Like so many other French films of the period, Quai is deeply rooted in the practices of the theatre – in this case specifically in the omnibus presentations of the music hall – and Clouzot is keen to give us all of the backstage color, the choleric maestro, the clutter of animal acts, the ropes and pullies. Mechanics in general attract him, and the era’s manual aesthetic is immensely cinematic. When Dora prints a photograph she turns a crank and it comes lolling out from between two large rollers like an oversized polaroid; when Maurice makes an abortive attempt at cutting his wrists his subsequent blood transfusion is powered by a hand pump.

Aside from the music hall the film’s other great setting is the Quai des Orfèvres themselves, the headquarters for the French investigative service – as Luc Sante points out in his excellent essay on the film, think Scotland Yard – and thus Inspector Antoine’s home turf. Music hall and police station are not however contrasted; if anything the point is to emphasize the communal nature of working life in general: throughout characters seek to appeal to their status as workers. When Jenny and Antoine joust over a point of his investigation they do so by comparing their working class bonafides, and when Antoine is pressured on the investigation’s morality – since everyone agrees that Brignon had it coming – he counters with the fact that he is only doing his job. The greatest comfort available to these characters is the unquestioned acceptance they receive from their community of fellow laborers. Maurice, an unpleasant sadsack, nonetheless moves easily among his fellow professionals; when he visits the music hall to establish his alibi before attempting to off Brignon, he’s told not to bother paying – he’s in the business – and has various favors urged upon him. Likewise, among his fellow policemen Antoine is with family; when he’s detained by his investigation and can’t take his son to Christmas mass his boss offers to do so for him. Amidst all this comradery it is notable that Dora, the most isolated of the characters, works only for herself.

In later life Clouzot fell completely out of fashion, and had a hard time getting work. As Richard Brody notes, as the French New Wave gained steam its directors were looking to Hollywood for inspiration, rather than the films of post-war France. It’s ironic, as Quai would have been an exemplary Hollywood product (minus of course the racial and sexual acceptance), particularly in the skillful way that it navigates various dark emotions before emerging, clarified, into the light of a happy conclusion. As it was Clouzot eventually found backing from the Americans (via Columbia), and died of a heart-attack while directing his final film, Infernal, an obsessive examination of obsessive jealousy that was left unfinished. This was in 1964, and that Clouzot was, twenty years after Quai des Orfèvres , still working through the white-hot current of jealousy that animates that film, should perhaps make us slightly more cynical of where it leaves Maurice and Jenny in the end – together and reconciled, ready to seize marital happiness, but still after all the same people, realistically and indelibly dyed with their respective patterns of flaws.