Brusque cops and femmes fatales: discovering Gilles Grangier’s forgotten noir gem

A big feature, and an even bigger pleasure, of this year’s Lumière film festival in Lyon is the retrospective for the French master of policiers and crime, Gilles Grangier, a director who enjoyed great commercial success in movies and later in TV from the 1950s to the 80s, working with actors such as Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura and the great screenwriter Michel Audiard (father of Jacques). He was a working-class film-maker who came up from the streets of Paris, and started in the movies as a stuntman, grip, prop boy, any job he could get.

Grangier is a name perhaps eclipsed now by Jean-Pierre Melville and made to feel obsolete in the 60s by the New Wave as he was making the kind of well-crafted, unpretentious genre pictures that the new generation of revolutionaries affected to despise (while admiring the Hollywood equivalent). But his movies here have been a revelation – the late Bertrand Tavernier, the founder of this festival, was always a great ally of Grangier’s – particularly his amazingly dry, witty, briskly unsentimental lowlife crime melodrama Le Désordre et la Nuit from 1958. This thriller was adapted by Grangier and Audiard from a novel by the French wartime journalist Jacques Robert, celebrated for his 1945 reports from Berlin and being one of the few writers who saw the inside of Hitler’s bunker.

Le Désordre et la Nuit is a perfect title that could apply to any noir: something to compare to Jules Dassin’s Night and the City. (The English title I have suggested is “Chaos and the Night”, though it was released in the US as The Night Affair.) Some of the sexual politics looks dated now, particularly the traditional rhetoric of slapping women (and women slapping men), though the three female characters here combine to upstage the male lead – the beau-moche figure of Gabin in his habitually wry, worldly-but-not-cynical mode.

Gabin plays Inspector Vallois of the Paris vice squad, a man feared and loathed by his duller, milksop colleagues for how rude he is on the phone and for how very effective he is at collaring villains. Vallois is called in when Simoni (Roger Hanin), the dodgy owner of a nightclub called L’Oeuf, is murdered – shot by an unknown assailant in a remote woodland spot to which he had driven late at night, apparently in expectation of a drug deal. The shooting happens right in front of Simoni’s German mistress, the would-be singer and highly strung good-time girl Lucky Fridel, played by Austrian star Nadja Tiller. (It’s never entirely clear if “Lucky” is her given name or a nickname.)

Vallois, drily detached and cool at all times, shows up at the club, where he is to meet and fall in love with the mercurial Lucky, who can look distraught and ill one moment, then go to the ladies’ room to “wash her hands” and emerge mysteriously bright and refreshed. Vallois is quietly startled to find that Lucky is no flophouse habituée – she is a wealthy daddy’s girl kept by her father at no less a hotel than the George V. But for all that they become intimate, Gabin’s deadpan cop never shows much emotion or tenderness: after they have sex, he asks brusquely and ungallantly who taught her those “gymnastics”.

Tiller is one of the women upstaging Gabin; another is the pharmacist who somehow knows Lucky, and that is Thérèse, marvellously played by the feline Danielle Darrieux, who has some entertainingly sparky dialogue with the stolidly sceptical Vallois. He playfully insists on being weighed on the pharmacy’s in-store scales and is mortified at the result: 83.4 kilos.

And the third female lead is the singer at L’Oeuf, Valentine, played by the Trinidadian star and anti-racism campaigner Hazel Scott, whose musical interludes are terrifically strong – much stronger than the “nightclub acts” in most French crime dramas like this.

Gabin has a wonderful walk home in the rain with Lucky, and finally an amazingly romantic and gentle final car journey with her, where they talk together about Montpensier cherries. Vallois turns out to be a keen gardener at his humble suburban home (a vision of peaceful retirement far from the world of cops and robbers, which is a little like Melville’s Le Doulos). Le Désordre et la Nuit is a forgotten noir gem.