A Film Canon

One of the finest pieces of French noir, Quai Des Orfèvres is ultimately a portrait of the eponymous police headquarters, generalising the characteristics of the hard-boiled detective to the entire police force which is, in turn, personified by Inspector Antoine (Louis Jouvet), called in to investigate a murderous love triangle. In the process, however, various hard-boiled traits are lost - most notably sexual awareness, which is replaced, generally, by the poignant fraternity of the force (culminating with the Christmas Eve sequence in which they pool money for a wreath for a late colleague) and, specifically, by Antoine's dedication to his little boy, adopted as an orphan in the French colonies. Concomitantly, he exhibits a categorical disinterest in women that clarifies the extent to which the jaded indifference of his American contemporaries is merely an inverse flirtation, or affirmation of the basic value of the nuclear family. To this end, Clouzot tends to circumscribe the action to those spaces in which female sexuality is peculiarly prominent, emphasising Antoine's oblivion in a semi-comic register that culminates with his advice to a witness required to identify the suspect from a room full of beautiful blondes: "Step up - they won't bite! You're not afraid of women?" That said, audience expectations still require some kind of male-female connection, but even this is phrased in extrinsic terms, as a shared alienation from most women ("When it comes to women, we'll never have a chance"), and doesn't last beyond the purview of the narrative. Beyond this particular idiosyncrasy, Clouzot achieves a level of suspense worthy of Hitchcock - particularly through his use of sound, both ambient and narrative, which ensures that the most intense moments always occur against some cacaphony, whether of women, typewriters or rehearsing instruments - while narrativising his taste for oblique angles and confusing compositions with a series of opaque, disorienting scenarios that only gradually - if perfectly - fall into place; that is, by forcing the viewer to identify with, rather than merely acknowledge, the clarifications hindsight brings, and which are peculiarly endemic to noir.