There are three competing theses for what went wrong with Jean Renoir’s Night at the Crossroads (aka La Nuit du Carrefour), a 1932 whodunit of the old school but with some very strange jumps, bumps, gaps, leaps of logic and filmic equivalents of handbrake turns.
Number one is that Renoir was depressed while making it and so was often drunk. He simply made a mess of it. Another is that he ran out of money and so never really finished it. The third is that somewhere in the process a reel of film got lost, the one that would have gone a long way towards tying everything together.
Whatever the reason, the film works well in spite of – maybe because of – the discontinuities, which add an overlay of strangeness to the atmospherics Renoir was obviously interested in capturing.
It was the first time a Georges Simenon story had been made into a film – Renoir himself had driven to Simenon’s house, asked for the rights and minutes later the men had struck a deal – so is also the first time the pipe-smoking, Sherlock Holmes-influenced Inspector Maigret appears on screen. He’s played here by Jean Renoir’s older brother, Pierre.
It’s not just a murder mystery but also, depending on who you’re asking, the first film noir, with Maigret called in after the body of a Dutch/Jewish diamond dealer is found dead in a car at a crossroads where there are only three houses. The rich Danish brother and sister, Carl and Else Andersen, live in one. The snobbish bourgeois French Michonnets inhabit the other. And sandwiched in between is a garage, where cars pull in for fuel and come to be repaired and people regularly come and go.
The only slight oddness is that the dead man’s body was found on the Danes’ property, but in the car belonging to the Michonnets. The Andersens’ car, meanwhile, is in the Michonnets’ garage.
All is explained eventually, but only after Maigret has sucked on his pipe for the majority of the film, doing little more than getting in everybody’s way. He is laid back to the point of distraction, at one point standing around for several minutes giving all his attention to a baguette he’s munching his way through. Maigret, in effect, simply watches and waits until someone makes a mistake.
Pierre Renoir is particularly good as the patient, fair-minded, cool and smart French cop, a still presence in a drama that circles around him. It’s a good cast generally but the most obvious other standout is Winna Winifried, and if this is the first film noir then she is the first femme fatale. Winifried’s Else Andersen is a particularly good one, hot, wanton and dangerous, clad in a figure-hugging black jersey dress and draping herself all over Maigret from the moment the two meet until the cop brings the curtain down in one of those finales where there is a flurry of revelation and a dash for the finishing line.
Jean Renoir shot much of it at night, and a lot of it takes place outside, in the fog and the rain and the cold, Renoir using the atmospherics of the weather and the location to add a layer of murk and mystery. He also uses sound in an unusual way, high in the mix – car noise, files on metals, horns – all of this coming to a head in a bizarre car chase towards the end, in which neither the fleeing car nor the chasing car can really be seen.
There are some bizarre edits, especially early on, when the action jumps from the scene of the crime to, for example, an entirely unconnected street scene in which all that’s visible is a roadsweeper’s brush sweeping rubbish towards a drain. A metaphor for Maigret?
Most likely, in any version you see the image will be terrible and the sound is also pretty bad – there was a constant humming in the background of the one I watched. But the film itself is worth it. The great Hungarian director Béla Tarr claims it as an influence on his work, and Godard once called it “the only great French detective movie.” Shortcomings or no, it deserves to be seen.
Night at the Crossroads aka La Nuit du Carrefour – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
