The Night at the Crossroads

When Wilfrid Sheed succeeded Dwight Macdonald as film critic for Esquire in 1967 (try and let that marinate for a moment), he saw Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning at a revival house and complained that the print being exhibited was so encrusted with what he called “period fuzz” that it impaired his ability to fully appreciate its qualities. What Sheed meant by “period fuzz” is easy to figure out: it was the unrestored condition of film prints that had been banging around too long, enduring damage from the elements, from wear and tear, and from its copyright owners’ determination to squeeze every last penny out of it. 

If Sheed had seen the film that Renoir made the year before Boudu, called La Nuit du carrefour (The Night at the Crossroads), he would’ve run, screaming, from the theater. This film has, over the 89 years since its release, taken on a somewhat legendary status. It was evidently unavailable for viewing when André Bazin was writing his splendid monograph of Renoir, which he left unfinished at his death in 1958. (The book, which Bazin’s protegé François Truffaut called “the best book on the cinema, written by the best critic, about the best director,” contains an essay on Le Crime de Monsieur l’Ange that was written by Bazin the day before he died.) To make matters worse, Jean-Luc Godard, always a very emotional critic, hung this albatross around the film’s neck: 

The shots which ring out in the night, the roar of a Bugatti racing after the smugglers (a brilliant sequence speeding through the streets of the slumbering village), the dazed or shady looks of the inhabitants of the godforsaken hamlet. Winna Winfried's English accent and her old-fashioned eroticism. Pierre Renoir's drooping falcon's eye, the smell of the rain and the fields soaked by the mist, every detail, every second of every shot, makes La Nuit du Carrefour the only great French detective movie – in fact, the greatest of all adventure movies. 

Fortunately, this almost nonsensical notice was placed as a kind of afterthought in an appendix of Bazin’s book. The word for Night at the Crossroads is murky: murky in atmosphere, with which it practically drips, murky in its characterizations, with everyone – except the film’s hero – always trying to deceive one another. The film is also supposed to have suffered a loss of some of its finished scenes or else Renoir simply ran out of money, didn’t shoot all the scenes that are supposed to be missing and cobbled together as coherent a film narrative as he could. This might explain the film’s brevity, but not quite. 

The Simenon novel was published in 1931 and was the seventh novel to feature the lead character Inspector Maigret. It is distinguished by its establishment of atmosphere and its vividly-drawn characters. Renoir adapted the novel, not too faithfully, a year after its publication. 

At a benighted country crossroads, where a garage and two houses face one another rather precariously, a Jewish diamond dealer is found dead at the wheel of a car parked in the wrong garage. The owner of the garage, a Dane, Carl Andersen, with a black monocle in place of a left eye, is brought to Paris for a lengthy interrogation by Inspector Jules Maigret. Satisfied that Andersen isn’t withholding anything from him, Maigret decides to secure the scene of the crime and do his detecting at the crossroads itself.

Andersen’s interrogation lasted seventeen hours in the novel. Renoir marks the passage of time with shots of the street outside, of a newspaper kiosk where people ask first for the morning paper and later the evening paper. Georges Koudria’s thick accent as Carl is offset by Winna Winfried’s funny accent as his "sister" Else (an accent misidentified by Godard as “English” – the actress was born in Copenhagen). Simenon calls her a “cinema vamp,” and “She was the typical tart, ordinary and vulgar, healthy and cunning.” Maigret clearly finds her alluring, but only because he knows that nothing is what it seems. Michonnet and his fake respectability and his foolish wife. Oscar’s garage, to which Renoir returns time and again to show us merely the routine goings-on of every other garage, turns out to be a beehive of criminal activity. As Maigret discovers, it is nothing but a front for an elaborate fencing operation. 

The truly droll aspect of the story is that Carl Andersen, who was the first suspect in the murder of Goldberg, is actually the only innocent person at the crossroads. (He is really Else's husband.) Everyone else, Oscar, his wife and mechanics, the Michonnets, and, above all, Else, is culpable. Renoir succeeds in capturing the peculiar atmosphere of Simenon’s novel, an atmosphere of violence meted out from speeding cars and in sudden flashes in the dark. He gives us clues about the suspicious activities in the garage (stolen goods are being transported inside tires) that Simenon withholds. Thanks to Renoir, Maigret doesn’t have to solve the mystery of who killed Goldberg (and Goldberg’s wife) in the climactic scene. In fact, Renoir ensures that there is no mystery by showing us the man with the rifle who shoots Madame Goldberg on the darkened road. He shows us Michonnet putting the bottles of poisoned beer through the broken kitchen window. 

Godard’s superlatives aside, the best that Renoir could have hoped to achieve with Night at the Crossroads was a superior whodunnit, except Renoir keeps us way ahead of Simenon’s master detective. If you compare it to Marcel l’Herbier’s bigger-budgeted The Mystery of the Yellow Room (starring Roland Toutain, who would attain immortality as André Jurieu in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game nine years later), Renoir’s film is much less diffuse and more effective. Whatever the reasons for the film coming up short at only 71 minutes (in the version that I saw anyway), it is succinct and purposeful from beginning to end – even if the purpose is only to do Simenon justice. Winna Winfried is perhaps the only mystery in the film - a sphynx without riddles. (Renoir had a weakness for beautiful bad actresses.) Jean's brother Pierre Renoir was the first actor to play Maigret, and while he isn’t quite up to the standard set by Jean Gabin, he is the more fascinating for getting there first.