NOIR AS SOCIETAL MIRROR: Julien Duvivier's PANIQUE (1946, dir by Julien Duvivier, based on a novel by Georges Simenon, starring Michel Simon, France)

First off, please watch this movie (it's available to stream on CRITERION). It's a masterpiece that somehow has slipped through the cracks of the more talked about canonical movies of the time.

PANIQUE, based on a novel by master existential mystery/thriller author, Georges Simenon, directed by the famed Julien Duvivier, and staring the incomparable Michel Simon (one of the best actors to have ever practiced the craft), is brutal.

And unfortunately, in our strange and uncertain times, maybe a brutal “it can happen here” wake up call is what we need.

It tells the story of a mistrusted loner, Monsieur Hire (Simon), who raises suspicions amongst his fellow townspeople after a woman in her 40's is found murdered in a vacant lot. However we, the audience, know that the murder was committed by a local pimp/gangster who poses as a mechanic. He gets his just released girlfriend to seduce Hire so they can plant evidence in Hire's apartment and pin the murder on him. 

After that. . .well. . .let's just say what transpires does not show humanity in its best light.

And there's good reason for that. Made in 1946 in France, just a year after France's return to independence after Nazi occupation, PANIQUE is a not so thinly veiled critique of collaboration, mob mentality, hysteria, gossip, and accusation. 

Part of a sub-genre of what might be called "brutal society satires", PANIQUE is of a piece with other masterpieces like Fritz Lang's FURY, Billy Wilder's ACE IN THE HOLE, William Wellman's THE OX BOW INCIDENT: movies that show how fear, spectacle, and rage can lead people as a group to abandon reason, fairness, and caution.

Filmmaker Duvivier (famous for the great 1930's gangsters in Algiers PEPE LE MOKO among other French classics) had, like fellow French moviemaker Jean Renoir, gone to the US to make movies during World War II. They both returned to a traumatized, cagey, and scarred France. They both also had to walk a tightrope since they had left France rather than stay during the occupation.

Nevertheless, Duvivier takes a pretty acid eyed approach to the material. A carnival comes to town during the story and the connection between mob hysteria and a societal gravitation to spectacle over logic and reason dominates the entire picture.

The amazing, can't take my eyes off him, Michel Simon, famous for his roles in Renoir's LA CHIENNE, BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING, and Jean Vigo's L'ATALANTE, among others, anchors the movie as strange loner Monsieur Hire who lives alone in an apartment and makes his neighbors suspicious.

We get why the neighbors are suspicious but Simon as Hire also makes it clear that he, Hire, is empathetic AND sharp. And innocent.

One of the most damning aspects of the movie is the central criminal couple who frame Hire. Alice has just done time for her lover, the pimp/criminal Alfred. We see from the start that Alfred knows how to manipulate Alice. But worse, Alice seems to know better but because of her own trauma and abuse, chooses to obey her ruinous boyfriend over a person who has sincere feelings for her.

Maybe put more simply, Alice chooses the pimp who exploits her and doesn't care about her over a chance at a normal life and redemption. The movie does a good job to show that Alice struggles with her choices on some levels. But choices she makes. And consequences there are.

The movie, like Duvivier's other films, is drunk with lush noir photography and tropes. Many site Duvivier's PEPE LE MOKO as the partial inspiration for CASABLANCA. And PANIQUE is a panoply of rich noir photography. One shot, in particular, of Hire silhouetted at his apartment window, carnival light dancing on his ceiling, as he peeps in on Alice in her apartment is a graphic masterpiece.

While maybe not as cinematically lithe as Lang’s FURY or as brutally satiric as Wilder’s ACE IN THE HOLE, Duvivier’s PANIQUE is eighty proof in its irony. The final shot of a carnival singer singing about the redemption and shared humanity of the world moments after seeing the fates of the three leads is gonna cause either a laugh or a groan or both. Either way, you feel the jagged glass in your stomach.

Spinoza said "Know the worst but believe in the best." It's an important directive for anyone who is an optimist. Like the sense that faith needs doubt. 

Without wrestling with a movie like PANIQUE, how can a person's optimism mean anything in the brutality of the real world?

Craig Hammill is the founder.principal.head programmer of Secret Movie Club.