Jenny (Suzy Delair) is a young hopeful singer who wants to make it big in the theatre. Her singing talents are limited but she isn’t let this get in her way. She flirts and seduces popular people around the industry. This makes her husband and accompanist Maurice (Bernard Blier) jealous. He discovers that Jenny is planning to meet an eccentric and rich older man. So he snaps and plans to kill him. When it comes time to do the deed, he discovers that someone else killed him. Before he can escape his car is stolen. So now he worries he will be the prime suspect. Things start to heat up when Inspector Antoine (Louis Jouvet) is put on the case.
Quai des Orfevres (1947) was the third movie directed by writer turned director Henri-Georges Clouzot. The man who would become a key rival towards Hitchcock’s title for Master of Suspense. He would make bathrooms scary and get Hitchcock nervous with his 1955 masterpiece Les Diaboliques. While that film is rightly labeled a masterpiece by cinephiles across the world, it seems his earlier work (and much of Early French cinema in general) has been hiding in the shadows. Quai is a welcomed surprise that will hopefully find a new audience with this Kino Lorber Blu-ray.
While on the surface it looks like a police procedural and a murder mystery, Quai des Orfevres is nice plenty of dark comedy and a marriage picture. Clouzot keeps the tone dark yet playful. Much of this is helped by the great cast. Bernard Blier is completely hopeless. Everything he does turns into a disaster. We feel sorry for him, but we also have to laugh at how insane the story gets. Suzy Delair starts out as a tough femme fatale, but she soon becomes the heart of the picture. Yes, she has cheated on her husband, but still lives to follow her dreams, and during the third out she outsmarts everyone and fixes her marriage. Louis Jouvet gives an intense but likable performance, who foreshadows some of the police characters in later German Krimi films and gialli.
This movie is filled with style with moody cinematography by Armand Thirard. Smooky clubs, and cluster piles in rooms. The movie’s limited budget is all on-screen with plenty of gloss. It has all the production values as a more pricy Hollywood movie, but with some of the dread left over from World War 2. While not as visually thrilling as Wages of Fear or Les Diaboliques, The finished film is a handsome piece of French cinema.
Kino Lorber gives Quai des Orfevres the grand treatment on Blu-ray. The 1080p HD transfer looks fantastic with only a few moments of print damage in the opening credits. Some parts of the frame shake for a few seconds. The Black levels are smooth and the focus is sharp in most of the close-ups.
The 2.0 French DTS-HD MA audio is smooth with no hiss or pops. The soundtrack is muffled in a few scenes. Most of the effects are crisp. English subtitles are included.
In terms of extras we have:
- An Audio commentary with film critic Nick Pinkerton. He covers a lot of the film’s background and the state of French cinema at the time. A little dry in parts but still some good information.
- Theatrical trailer
- Interviews with Clouzot, Bernard Blier, Suzy Delair, and Simone Renant that were part of the 1971 French TV show “Au Cinema ce Sair”.
Fans of French cinema and thrillers are in for a treat thanks to this handsome release from Kino Lorber. Highly Recommended.
Director- Henri-Georges Clouzot
Cast- Louis Jouvet, Bernard Blier, Suzy Delair
Country of Origin- France
Discs- 1
Distributor- Kino Lorber
Reviewer- Tyler Miller