Deadlier Than the Male: Julien Duvivier

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/2016-new-york-film-festival/.

5/10

A Man's Neck: Julien Duvivier

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

Panique: Julien Duvivier

I don't know if it will be possible for me to discuss Julien Duvivier's Panique without comparing it to Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire (1989), its remake. It has been over a year since I saw Monsieur Hire, but I seem to remember it being very different from Panique. I never got the feeling that Leconte's Hire was a bad or strange person; he was just an isolated voyeur. But there is definitely something...strange...about Duvivier's Hire. He is also more explicitly coded as an "other" within the community because of his Jewish background. I seem to remember Leconte's Hire being more passive, but Duvivier's Hire seems to get a weird pleasure from toying with the woman's boyfriend and the police. Also, the impact of Duvivier's Hire's betrayal has less of an impact because we watch the villains calculate and execute the double-cross whereas it practically came out of nowhere in Monsieur Hire. That's not to say that the ending of Panique isn't powerful. The last third of the film seems to evoke Fritz Lang's Fury (1936), another film where an innocent man is hounded and destroyed by a community with a lynch-mob mentality. The concluding scenes of Panique are downright electric, aided in no small part by Nicolas Hayer’s brilliant cinematography which easily matches the crème de la crème of Hollywood. His interiors and dialogue scenes are moody and dark and the crowd scenes vibrate with captivating energy. One of these days I'll have to re-watch this film back-to-back with Monsieur Hire so that I can confirm (or disprove) my observations about how they are different.

8/10
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I later revisited this film during my coverage of the 2016 New York Film Festival. Here's the link to my review. I still award this film an 8/10 rating.

http://theretroset.com/2016-new-york-film-festival/

Pépé le Moko: Julien Duvivier

[Revisit Review]

To read this review, go to: http://www.theyoungfolks.com/review/the-film-canon-pepe-le-moko-1937/43534.

9/10