DVR Diary: L'ASSASSIN HABITE AU 21 (1942)

Henri-Georges Clouzot is "the French Hitchcock," a master of the thriller genre best known for his films The Wages of Fear and Diabolique. He started out, however, with a film that on story terms is nearly on the level with the Poverty Row stuff of 1940s Hollywood. "The Murderer Lives at Number 21" is a sequel, or at least in the same series, as a film Clouzot had recently written, Le Dernier de Six. Both are taken from detective novels by the Belgian writer Stanislas-Andre Steeman, who co-wrote the screenplay for L'Assassin. Steeman's detective is Wens Vorobeychik (Pierre Fresnay of Grand Illusion fame), a policeman tasked with capturing the brazen serial killer known as "Monsieur Durand." This Durand leaves a calling card on the bodies of his victims, presumably to taunt the police. We see him at work -- more accurately, we walk in his shoes as he stalks a drunken lottery winner in an early scene made up of a nice tracking shot. Wens is under the typical pressure from higher-ups to crack the case, but he also has to worry about his girlfriend Mila (Suzy Delair, still with us at age 101), an aspiring singer-actress who decides to hunt down the killer as some sort of publicity stunt. You've seen her type in many an American film.

Wens gets an important lead when a burglar is arrested with a bunch of Monsieur Durand business cards in his pocket. The crook explains that he stole them from the boarding house at 21 Junot, which must be where the murderer lives. The place is infested with possible suspects or red herrings: a stage magician, a toymaker exploiting the terror by crafting faceless Monsieur Durand dolls, a presumably blind former boxer, etc. Like any great detective, Wens hopes to sort out the suspects by disguising himself as the newest boarder, a Bible-clutching Protestant clergyman. At around the same time, however, the killer starts to strike very close to home. And before long, Mila takes a room as well.

The story may be silly, but Clouzot shows a precocious sure hand with his actors -- I especially like the scene where the magician keeps up a calm, bland conversation with Wens while performing all manner of tricks with his hat -- and keeps his audience hopping with abruptly discovered kills that disrupt the detective's deductions. It actually takes a flash of intuition on Mila's part to get to the bottom of the mystery, though we may be meant to assume that Wens had reached the same conclusion by other means. The climax is simply dumb, spelling the truth out in the most blatant way -- ask yourself why everyone in the scene needs to be there -- and depending on pulp assumptions about criminals' need to boast and explain their methods in order to delay Wens' demise until reinforcements can arrive. To be fair, the film has no real ambition apart from being a goofy comedy-mystery, and it's made with enough panache that you can't really hold its stupidity against it. As a French variation on a Anglo-American potboiler formula it has inherent interest for the cosmopolitan cinephile, as well as flashes of the talent that had masterworks in its future.