La nuit du carrefour

Simenon’s legendary Inspector Maigret first appeared onscreen in this rarely seen 1932 thriller, directed by none other than Jean Renoir and starring Renoir’s brother Pierre. Made in collaboration with Simenon, the film depicts a diamond merchant’s death at a lonely crossroads near Paris, and the investigation that follows. Renoir concerns himself not with plot, though, but with creating an atmosphere of suffocating dread “thick enough to slice, eerie and haunted” (John Wakeman). For Jean-Luc Godard, La nuit du carrefour was “the only great French detective film, and, indeed, the greatest French film adventure.”