Holiday-themed movies are as ubiquitious to the Christmas season as that inescapable, gawdawful novelty song by Paul McCartney that dominates the airwaves and causes more car accidents in December than driving on icy roads and overindulging at office parties combined.

But does a film necessarily have to include Bing Crosby crooning or Chevy Chase setting his tree on fire to be a fully licensed "Christmas classic?" Before you slip in your well-worn copy of It's a Wonderful Life or Jingle All the Way, consider some titles off The Pink Smoke's alternative list of movies that kinda/sorta have something to do with the most wonderful time of the year.

~ by john b. cribbs ~

What kind of sordid holiday do we have in mind for you, gentle reader, to open our annual Cine-Mas marathon with a film from famed cinematic deviant and misanthropic auteur Henri-Georges Clouzot? The only gifts Clouzot characters ever unwrapped were envelopes containing the corrupting poison pen letters of Le Corbeau. Rather than paint portraits of bustling snowbound villages strewn with glimmering lights paving the festive paths of cheerful merry-makers, he offered the dead end destitution of Wage of Fear's squalid, mercilessly humid Las Piedras. In lieu of life-altering Christmas spirits, the noctural visitor of Diabolique's Véra Clouzot is the sodden ghost of her abusive husband. Hardly the type of fare to put unassuming audiences in the holiday mood.

Then again, you'd think the same would apply to a film involving obsession, infidelity, deception, homicidal jealousy, murder, cop-killing, police torture, attempted suicide and a risqué burlesque number featuring a scandalous amount of booty-shaking. But the derrière the merrier I say, and Quai des Orfèvres performs a minor Christmas miracle by incorporating Clouzot's interest in the less pleasant aspects of humanity into what could ultimately be described as a light holiday-set comedy-thriller, one that's never more queasily objectionable than it is vastly enjoyable. Which isn't to say that it skimps on the kind of unbearable tension and nasty behavior one can expect from Clouzot - it's just the only one of his films I've seen that features a comedic reaction shot of a dog, for example.*

You can't blame Clouzot for playing it safe in his first film since being reinstated into the French film community following the scandal surrounding Le Corbeau. Lightening the tone was probably a sound idea, though the director already had a comedy-thriller under his belt with 1942'S L'Assassin Habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at Number 21). Like Quai ds Orfèvres, it was based on a book by Simenon-esque Wallonian writer Stanislas-André Steeman with an address-based title and featured Suzy Delair playing a similiar role as a bouncy chanteuse, one who resents her pipe-chewing sleuth boyfriend for spending more time investigating a series of murders than fawning over her (despite this, she eventually manages to work out the identity of the killers while singing a song called "Trio"). L'Assassin was Clouzot's first feature film, and it established his signature cocktail of insidious characters and patulous mistrust within an institutional setting. The Les Mimosas boarding house at No. 21 Avenue Junot harboring the serial killer(s) of L'assassin was a precursor to Corbeau's hospital of open secrets, the twisting hallways of the second-rate boarding school where the murderous conspiracy is hatched in Diabolique, the various rooms of the run-down sanatorium in which dubious characters collide in Les Espions,** even the hotel-resort that houses contempt and jealousy in the ill-fated production L'Enfer.

Clouzot sets his cryptograms of human cruelty inside bustling schools, places of healing and sunny taverns to emphasize how such innocuous foundations are corrupted by the behavior of their inhabitants, particularly the most depraved perpetrators who blacken the established locale like the filthy cesspool behind Diabolique's schoolhouse. Sometimes these institutions are blatantly violated: Corbeau's letters infiltrate the church, the hospital, the shops, the town hall, people's private homes and the local school, which at one point is requisitioned for a joint police investigation/mental torture session devised by the guilty culprit himself. But even when the corruption isn't premeditated, there's a general sense of immorality and casual injustice within established structures, an ambience derived from Clouzot's interest in the wavering balance between human connection and conspiracy. The men in Wages of Fear bond over their task to transport nitroglycerine, even though they've been placed in a suicidal situation (harmless trucks now rigged with explosives) by the oil company that dominates the town. The lawyers at the beginning of La Vérité chat amiably before court is in session, then ravage each other during cross examination. The psychiatrist working at the hospital in Le Corbeau preaches that there's no ultimate light or dark side, that no person is all-good or all-bad, a sermon delivered with friendly worldliness by the man who will ultimately be unmasked as the miscreant behind the perfidious letters: he ingratiates himself within the community only to turn the people against each other, even causing the suicide of one of the hospital's own patients. The general mistrust of institutions seeded within the narrative of Clouzot's films stems from the fact that those inside are as cold as the structures themselves, indicating a malice motivated not by necessarily good or evil intentions but resulting in the worst kind of harm.

With that in mind, Clouzot orchestrates an interesting reversal in Quai ds Orfèvres. At the start, we're presented with just the kind of wholesome institution Clouzot's characters love to sully, a music hall called the Eden. While it's not exactly reputable (a black marketeer left over from the war is employed as a stagehand) the camaraderie of its performers provides the venue a wholesome air, as showcased by Clouzot treating us to an uncharacteristically chirpy - and exhilirating - montage of a song's genesis from the writing stage to its enthusastic reception on an actual stage. The perfect platform for some good old Clouzotesque viciousness and sure enough, tensions are already rising backstage as pianist/accompaniest Maurice Martineau chides his headstrong songbird spouse Jenny Lamour (née Marguerite Chauffournier) for openly flirting with everyone and anyone who can help her career. Maurice will further debase his base of operation by using it as a cover for a hastily plotted murder, in stark contrast to the Eden's harmless magic acts and novelty tunes. Such baseness is on par with what we've come to expect from the director, but in the final stretch of the film the action shifts to the police station of the title, a cold, confining maze of tiny, unadorned rooms where fun is the last thing on anybody's mind. It's here that the duplicitous acts of the lead characters become less egregious than the idea that they may actually be punished for them. Clouzot placing them within these two very different turfs, the Eden and Quai des Orfèvres, provides his unscrupulous players a glint of humanity: instead of characters bringing despair to the brightest of places, these characters redeem themselves by surviving the most unfeeling. By acting contrary to his typical cynicism, Clouzot tasks himself with somehow bringing his doomed characters from the bleak setting of this police station on a gray Christmas Eve into the sunny, snowy Christmas morning that serves as the film's unexpectedly buoyant epilogue.

So how do a couple on the brink of total collapse end up cheerfully reunited at home mere hours later, in the only Clouzot film to end with the sound of laughter? Well for one thing, unlike his other thrillers, in Quai ds Orfèvres the question of who actually committed the crime isn't one Clouzot cares too much about.*** While the dynamic of Maurice, Jenny and their friend and neighbor Dora Monier may hint at the ruinous love triangle of Diabolique, we've privy to all their actions the night of the murder and know where each of them stand. The key difference between these three ostensibly guilty parties and the director's usual suspects hiding in plain sight - the killer(s) in 21, le Corbeau, Diabolique's "ghost" husband in the school picture, the atomic scientist in Les Espions among the collective of patients at the psychiatric ward - is that none of them are really hiding. Not well, anyway. Even before he resolves to an impulsive crime of passion, Maurice is mocked by Jenny for his lack of criminal imagination and inevitable capture. Sure enough, once a body has been found (somebody got there first) and suspicion falls squarely on Maurice, his alibi of being at the theater at the time of the murder falls to pieces through a combination of nervousness and spectacular bad luck. Not that Jenny fares any better: believing that her sharp blow to the head with a champagne bottle finished off the victim in question, she quickly covers her own tracks, thus implicating herself in a murder she didn't even commit. Secretly smitten with Jenny, photographer Dora (a Clouzot creation not found in the source novel) further complicates things by hastening to the crime scene and erasing evidence that would have led to the real killer. In the aftermath of the murder, she subtly sees to it that Maurice remains the prime suspect, discouraging Jenny from turning herself in. Hopeless, homicidal and hung up though they may be, their ultimate motivations are harmless enough: Jenny wants to be a star, Maurice wants absolute assurance that Jenny won't run around behind his back, Dora wants to be with Jenny. None of them get what they want, but they all settle for the consolation holiday gift: not being sent to jail for murder.

Even Antoine, Louis Jouvet's gaunt inspector (far less tactful but just as meticulous as Charles Vanel in Diabolique), has his reasons for relentlessly hounding the three suspects. By feigning indignation at being investigated, they aggravate a contempt for the police that must have been common in post-war France following years of prostate scorn towards the Vichy government and its commandeering of authority from the French law enforcement. The unwashed stain of collaboration is reflected in the film by the coat-check lady who trips over backwards to get Antoine to interview her and the bartender who denounces his cabbie customer to the cops, proudly stating his affinity for the purpose the police serve before diligently inquiring as to a reward for his own sense of duty. With such enthusiastic backstabbing going on, the untenable perjuries of the film's protagonists feel slightly more vindicated, although the police aren't cast as villains. The entire station is particularly sore following the murder of one of their own during a recent heist - bad news for amateur criminals who think they can take the cops for a ride. Antoine points out that people only appreciate the police when they need them, frustrated that his diligence and hard work are deemed prying and oppressive; his authority is so disrespected he even had his signature inspector's raincoat stolen (hopefully he gets a new one for Christmas). His investigation may in fact be tenacious, but putting his suspects through the ringer at Quai des Orfèvres to reassert his jurisdiction is no less valid than their own endeavors to mislead Antoine in order to secure their freedom.

Clouzot going out of his way to create a clear argument for each of his characters' actions is what makes this title so singular to his filmography. Coming off his commuted blacklisting in the French film industry, he had the perfect blueprint for sticking it to both the entertainment industry (represented by the Eden and its disorganized directors) and the French government (the police station with its bullying agents). You could argue that he worked in some slight jabs here and there, but mostly Clouzot eschews satire in favor of sympathetic characters. Even the two indisputably immoral figures in the film, a hardened criminal and the murder victim, a short, odious hunchbacked monster of a magnate who actively leers at intended targets (the conquest of whom appears to be his sole focus in life - he even confesses to preferring nubile flesh to great works of art), have their endearing qualities. The heister spends the final third of the film being grilled by cops: besides the fact that he's suffering the same indignity as movie's heroes, the way Clouzot shoots him in the center of the room surrounded by tough lawmen almost makes you want to have him come out on top (even though he allegedly killed a policeman). As for murder victim Brignon, since everybody else has their secrets, his open lusting for young women comes off as practically charming. In a movie filled with people lying through their teeth to cover up their sinister deeds, his motives are the most touchingly transparent, watching his young charge disrobe like he's opening his present Christmas morning and making no pretense of his true intentions towards Jenny when confronted by Maurice.

For his part, Maurice's intense jealousy brings to mind the impulse behind the crimes of Corbeau's Dr. Vorzet and Serge Reggiani's hotelier in the abandoned L'Enfer, particularly as it accentuates a dissonance to his lively venue - in Maurice's case, the Eden. But unlike Vorzet, whose specific targeting of his unfaithful wife and her lover isn't discovered until Corbeau's very last scene, Maurice's fear of his wife straying is apparent from Quai ds Orfèvres' very first. His infatuation with Jenny has forced him into a meager existence among the music hall inhabitants: having been disowned by his prestigious parents after marrying a singer with "previous boyfriends," he followed Jenny into this pit of cigar smoke and hack comedians cycling in circles on penny-farthings. He expects her to respect and admire his sacrifice, instead everyone sees him for what he is: a dangerously enamored, boundlessly insecure schlub whose most noble virtue is to feel sorry for himself. Rather than root for her success, he sees Jenny's popularity as a threat to his tenuous control over her. Jenny, on the other hand, has developed into a shameless opportunist: relating to Madame de Pompadour she's "all for royalty," a "go-getter" as Antoine calls her, with fame and fortune as remuneration for growing up in a two-room flat with six family members, washing up in the sink and eating "lousy" pork meat. At one point she throws her ignoble background in the face of Antoine, who looks down on her profession, but he throws it back by revealing his own childhood at a chateau with his father, the janitor, "cleaning other people's filth."

All this class indignation (Maurice even complains that Brignon would have been in jail long ago if he was poor) greatly informs the characters' behavior with the exception of Dora, who has her name proudly embroidered on her shirt as if to distinguish her independent personality from Antoine, whose first name we never learn due to his position in the police force, and her confidence from that of the insecure Jenny, who abandoned her real name to distance herself from her lowly upbringing. At least until La Vérité, Clouzot never explored the circumstances of his characters to this extent. In Diabolique we know Christina has money, but aren't given much about her life before marrying Michel. William Friedkin felt the need to establish how the ill-fated men came to desolation in South America when he remade Wages of Fear, since Clouzot wasn't telling. Going back to Le Corbeau, Germain's mysterious former life is treated as a late twist that only explains his actions retroactively: like most Clouzot protagonists he's been hiding. And even then his secrets are divulged more or less voluntarily; the heroes of Quai ds Orfèvres are compelled to lay out everything once inside the walls of the title precinct.****

Clouzot loves to center the third act of his films around an extended suspense set piece that involves all the major players: the townspeople gathered to write dictation to prove who might be le Corbeau, Véra Clouzot wandering around the darkened school before discovering her husband's "body" (after which both Simone Signoret and Charles Vanel get to reveal themselves behind curtains), Mario and Jo's disastrous tracking through the oil-filled crater left behind by their two detonated colleagues. The last 40 minutes of Quai ds Orfèvres are dedicated almost entirely to the characters at the station, with Maurice being interrogated, Dora refusing to make deposition, the car thief maintaining a smug playfulness under pressure and a new character, a brash hooker, being badgered by the cops - all while Jenny sits at home awaiting her husband so they can celebrate Christmas Eve together. The impending holiday has incited a flurry of chaotic activity at the station and hindered the investigation. The chief leaves early to get midnight mass seats at Notre Dame (leaving Antoine in charge, which is very nearly a disaster). Other cops fly out of the station clutching turkeys and tiny Christmas trees while interrogators anxious to do the same become increasingly impatient to get a confession. A judge won't issue a warrant because it's snowing and he's already home for the holiday. Tabloid reporters huddle up together in the standing room of the station complaining about how readers "could care less who killed Brignon, especially on Christmas Day!" (they'll turn up again in the courtroom of La Vérité).

It would feel more like a busy bus depot than a police headquarters if not for the unendurable tension within the isolated rooms, where the walls are closing on the accused parties. In these cheerless rooms, Christmas feels as far away as Jenny in the apartment - the cab driver is intimidated into identifying Jenny as his passenger the night of Brignon's murder, a creepy-looking cop clutching a wreath for the family of his murdered fellow officer takes revenge on the car thief, and one jittery, barefoot Bernard Blier, as a very un-merry Maurice, is pushed to a nervous breakdown.*** ** It's freezing, they run out of coal, there are six of them in the room: Maurice, two cops, the chief, Antoine and his snoozing son...it's just like Jenny described her childhood home. Clouzot has brought his heroes to a low point only alluded to earlier in the film, and unsparingly drags the extended sequence out. Compared to the opening montage of Jenny and the development of the her hit song, he suggests that while success and happiness arrive fleetingly quick, misery is paced in insufferable real time (with the exception of a single wipe used to transform afternoon into night in which the cast members remain in same position, a transition previously employed in Le Corbeau's unbearably protracted sequence of the townspeople giving handwriting samples).

Things are bleakest for Maurice as he's manhandled into a solitary cell, fully convinced that his goose is cooked (he's apparently so rattled by the whole experience he doesn't realize that his gun, which Antoine has left the station to retrieve, is useless as evidence against him). Shattering his watch against the wall, he cuts open his wrist and waits for life to bleed out of him. In a paradoxical move that practically defines his entire approach to the film, Clouzot chooses this most hopeless stage to reintroduce the revitalizing Christmas spirit. Placed behind bars next door, the hooker reaches out to Maurice, attempting unsuccessfully to stimulate some holiday cheer from the adjoining cell: "Hear the bells? Hark the herald angels sing!" The sliver of light Clouzot throws onto Maurice's face gives the shot a connection to the film's opening credits, which roll over the outside of a heavy prison door with a smoke-filled light emanating from the window as the music of Jenny's song blares over the soundtrack. The sound and visual link the two key locations of the film, the Eden and Quai des Orfèvres, with patrons of the music hall filling the venue with cigarette smoke as Jenny performs ("heralding" her intention to bounce her tralala), just as the puff-happy interrogating cops fog up their own locale. The spacious holding cell, desolate though it may be, is a haven for Maurice from these two places where he's never fit in, the sites of his most frustrating and traumatizing experiences. He's been defeated by both the "happy" institution where Jenny thrives and the "mean" institution run by Antoine, and it's out of gratitude for his removal from them that he seeks complete isolation through death (after he recovers, he complains that he felt so free and hated to be brought back). Clouzot obviously feels compassion for Maurice in this moment - just compare this almost tender depiction to the similarly resigned attempted suicide by drowning of the child who learns she's the product of an affair thanks to le Corbeau. Maybe Clouzot's not so sadistic after all?

You don't need a George Bailey to tell you that a man's most desperate psychological state is the perfect starting point for a full-on Christmas reversal of the ol' fortune. Maurice survives and is reunited with a repentent Jenny while the car thief quite miraculously owns up to Brignon's murder. The film's epilogue sees the exhausted couple returning home, where Maurice is overwhelmed by the festive ornaments with which Jenny has decorated the apartment. Their contentment at this denouement is stressed so distinctly, it's notable how different these characters end up compared to Clouzot's heroes who are housed in their institution (Germain lives at the school in Corbeau, so do the trio of Diabolique, ditto the Espions integrated into the psych hospital) or are displaced from their homes (the men of Wages of Fear, an imprisoned Bardot in La Vérité). This modest, private residence is the kind not often seen in the director's films (and the one in Diabolique becomes the scene of the first "murder"), offering the security Maurice pined for in his holding cell and that Jenny has neglected in her quest for fame. Its sanctity has been threatened - directly, when Jenny opens the door wide with an enthusiastic "Merry Christmas!" for Maurice only to find a team of cops busting in to search for his gun, and implicitly, in another location-linking transition where Antoine slamming the door closed on the car thief's interrogation cuts to the apartment, causing Maurice to jump up startled like he heard the sound of the door as Jenny, oblivious to the tightening noose, gets gifts to take over to grandma's. (Throughout the film Clouzot stays vigorously aware of how the specific setting relates to his characters' actions. In another inspired moment, he sets Maurice off on his comically botched attempt to establish an alibi by having him escape the backstage of the Eden during a show to the sound of a cymbal crash which tops his "trick" of escaping out the back door.)

The film's conclusion that the only true, incorruptible human contact is at home away from the smoky music halls and police stations could easily be read as sentimental. It's true - the hooker pegs Maurice as the "sentimental type" - but Clouzot's version of a transformative Christmas tale is to sentimentalize his normally remorseless characters. Maurice, Jenny and Dora could never be truly repugnant people because they have too strong a sense of where they come from and, ultimately, where they belong. With this film, Clouzot calls a temporary truce on his war with the degradation of the human conscience and emphasizes that by setting his conclusion at Christmas, an uncomplicated time following the typically torturous holiday bustle - get rid of the clutter of people with their own agendas, their private vices, their entanglement in the running of institutions and you just have people.

Quai ds Orfèvres is richly populated with various subgroups - the performers and stage crew of the Eden, the cops of Quai des Orfèvres, the reporters, the minor crooks of "another world" including the car thief and the hard-liner at the police station, the amiable wage-earners like the cabbie and the ticket-taker from the Enghien station so happy to get off working Christmas because the police picked him up as a witness - all with their own dymanics which form them into their own individual "families." Antoine has a family of his own, a half-Algerian son he brought back from the Colonies after being kicked out of the Foreign Legion ("him and malaria") for whom he purchases a Meccano Erector set as a reward for passing his school exams - the kid flunks geometry, so Antoine off-handedly comments he'll give it to him as a Christmas present instead*** *** (this, and the fact that Antoine's son was the result of an illicit tryst during the combustible period leading to the Algerian War, symbolizes the movie's unadulterated sweetness). The final shot of the film is of Antoine and his son walking away from the couple's home and from the camera, under an archway, Antoine having wrapped up the case and informed the kid that they can spend Christmas together after all (this immediately following the son decking him with a snowball, much to the delight of Maurice and Jenny in the window of their apartment - did I mention this was a very different kind of Clouzot movie??) The first thought I had about this shot was that, incredibly, it predated the same image - and more or less the same sentiment - of the very famous final shot of the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol:

But even moreso, it significantly mirrors the the opening shot of QDO's narrative proper, in which two unemployed entertainers (characters we'll never see again after the first scene) make their way to Leopardi Music Publishing, the talent agency where the plot will kick off. The fate of these two hopefuls is left in doubt as Clouzot shifts focus to Maurice and Jenny, and the only impression the audience is left of them is that they have literally nowhere to go other than the freezing talent office that's directly tied to the Eden but more closely resembles the police station. They're seemingly left perpetually moving from one cold office to another, in direct contrast to Antoine and his son, who have a very specific destination (Antoine's taking him out for a holiday meal) and are unified by closure (Antoine has solved the case and can now spend time with his boy).

Finally, the final shot of a father with his son walking away from camera brings to mind the final shot of a mother having just avenged her son (the suicided cancer patient) walking away from camera at the end of Clouzot's previous film, Le Corbeau. Again there's closure - the man who caused her son's death has been killed - although the stasis in which we exit the former film is decidedly much more grim. Not only has she lost her son, she's walking back to the town that has been turned into one big collaborator by the Corbeau's influencial correspondence (she passes a group of boys playing on the sidewalk, suggesting a possible return to innocence after the death of the terrorist, but how reassuring is that really?) Rather than throw off the shackles of the unfeeling institution as Antoine does by going off to spend Christmas with his son, she's reintegrated into the very network that killed hers. Not very Christmasy at all!

Just matching up those two final shots is enough to see how very singular Quai ds Orfèvres to Clouzot's body of work. More often his characters resubmitted themselves to their tarnished institutions (even Christina appears to have returned to the boarding school, apparently after death, in Diabolique) than allow themselves to be fulfilled in the comfort of their own home. To put it in holiday-friendly terms, there's just no place like home for the holidays. Or as the incarcerated hooker puts it, "We'd be better off home in bed."

POST-SCRIPT

I'm bummed that this article didn't really lend itself to further discussion of Dora Monnier, who's just so cool and beautiful and possibly my favorite of Clouzot's steely, jaded, bisexual blondes - otherwise known as a "funny kind of girl." "You and I are two of a kind. When it comes to women, we'll never have a chance." Dang... I'll have to write another Clouzot piece soon to make up for it. (Also this wasn't at all relevent, but Pixar animators, clearly fans of French cinema, modeled the forlorn face of Anton Ego in Ratatouille on the iconic visage of Louis Jouvet. Which is awesome.)