There are great intentions at work in Julien Duvivier's A Man's Neck. A moody detective thriller, it focuses on beloved French detective Inspector Maigret's quest to locate and capture a nihilistic killer who murdered a rich woman and framed a small-time crook for it. There's one sequence that was particularly excellent: when Maigret and his colleagues force the fall-guy to revisit the crime scene and re-enact the murder himself. But the film lacks a coherency of creative vision. While the first third is a solid detective story, the film falls victim to parades of static scenes where small to large groups of people stand around in small rooms and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk about the crime, the killer, his motives, etc, etc, etc. Partway through the film it shifts to the killer's perspective. A Czech medical student named Radek (played by the excellent Valéry Inkijinoff), he is a standard combination of misanthropic, Raskolnikov-esque qualities. He doesn't kill because he wants money or needs to fulfill some fetishistic urge; he kills because he hates people and society and wants to make them suffer. One potentially interesting sequence takes place near the end of the film where Radek takes a group of people he is extorting on a weird night out on the town before demanding that one of them has sex with him. I understand that Duvivier was using these scenes to demonstrate the steady crumbling of Radek's self-constructed sense of insouciance towards his actions. But they just come out feeling odd and misguided.
5/10
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