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LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR (NIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS)

(1932)

Pierre Renoir, Georges Terof, Winna Winfried, Georges Koudria; dir: Jean Renoir

Three quarters of a century on, La Nuit Du Carrefour remains obscured in the fog of both its own mystery and past audiences’ half-remembered pleasures.  In more ways than one it has the air of a lost film.  No subtitled print – let alone a DVD – is available* and yet past viewings linger lovingly in the memories of a few lucky souls who recall a film of extraordinary, unforgettable French noir atmosphere.   This chimes neatly with the film’s production history, where the legend has been printed so often it has gained an aura of fact.  This is that several reels of the finished film were misplaced (French cinephile Jean Mitry takes the rap in most accounts), leaving inexplicable gaps in the film’s plot.  While this resonates nicely as a film noir anecdote with the oft-repeated lacuna in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1945), where not even Chandler could explain who offed the chauffeur, on closer examination the facts get in the way of a good story.

Georges Altman’s phrase “languorous tempo” (Andrews 279) sums up this film well, as Carrefour‘s dynamic is actually most redolent of early 1930s Hollywood horror pix, especially those of the ‘old dark house’ variety.  Early on there’s some fine rhythmic editing, especially in the repetition around a city newsstand where we see the story told through successive headlines in the morning, midday and evening editions of a newspaper, all of which end up in a rain-soaked gutter, a deprecatory comment on the ephemeral nature of tabloid crime sensation.  This fuses to an extent with a tone in the film’s jaunty opening credits, and occasionally popping up throughout, that seems vaguely derisory, as if laughing at the thriller genre, undercutting it as if to say ‘it’s only pulp, after all’.  The villains seem to have a derisory attitude too, and their identity is bleedingly obvious well before it’s revealed, as if the ‘mystery’ doesn’t actually matter. 

In an era when Hitler’s formal ascension to power was only months away, political hindsight today enables some raised eyebrows upon seeing La Nuit Du Carrefour.  Its crime victims are prominently Jewish and this point is handled matter of factly, albeit tactlessly.  More disconcerting is the explicit xenophobia in the French villagers that is aroused by the suspects’ Danish origins, rendered through the quasi-Teutonic accents of two Danish actors cast for just this reason, which is quite jarring in a 21^st century viewing.  

Yes, there are shots of fog-enveloped roads but what seals Carrefour in the memory is its extraordinary car chase, possibly the best ever filmed, and that includes Bullitt (1968).  Renoir was renowned for preferring to record live sound, warts and all, rather than dub and re-voice, and (as with Bullitt) noise is one of the secret ingredients in the exhilarating sensation of taking a point of view ride in an open Bugatti racer in the night, bullets from the pursued car aimed at our faces whizzing just overhead, corkscrewing through dark, dank country laneways of high walls giving way to open fields and back again to even narrower alleys, all the while the incredible engine note grinding, rising and moaning brutally in the most coarse and rude tone imaginable – incredible!  “Gunshots shattering the darkness; the purr of a Bugatti setting off in pursuit of the traffickers… the smell of rain and of fields bathed in mist” was how Jean Luc Godard recalled the movie in 1957 in Cahiers du Cinéma, and one can see why.  

It is Godard who appears to be the primary source of the now well-entrenched myth of the missing reels of film rendering Carrefour ‘s narrative incomprehensible.  Sadly for the storytelling, this furphy manages to overlook the more sober history of Georges Sadoul four years earlier (p.76) who painstakingly describes the economic and production realities, whereby simply running out of money (Renoir was no businessman and was forced to sell off the inheritance of his father’s paintings to bail out his own production company) prevented necessary linking expository scenes to be shot at all.  As an historian Godard has always been more an interpreter than a reliable reporter. 

Overall, then, Carrefour is little more than a convoluted Hercule Poirot style mystery procedural, which even Renoir himself seemed to disdain.  I hate to reduce a legend to a mere car chase, but it is an extraordinarily visceral sequence… and, anyway, some memories are best left shrouded in mists of longing. 

-           Roger Westcombe

References

Andrew, D (1995). Mists of Regret.  Princeton University Press.

Sadoul, G (1953),  French Film.  London; The Falcon Press. 

* Kudos to Mat Kesteven of the Brisbane International Film Festival for not only securing a difficult to obtain print in 2006, but also for coordinating new English subtitles based on information supplied by the British Film Institute.