Simenon by Barry Forshaw

Author:Barry Forshaw [Forshaw, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857305145
Publisher: Oldcastle Books
Published: 2022-04-01T12:13:19+00:00

SIMENON ON SCREEN

The listings below (which are comprehensive, but not exhaustive) are divided into films based on Maigret novels and those based on romans durs, and each list is chronological by the year in which the films were first released. The original title is indicated first (in its original language, where possible) and the country of origin, together with the year of release. This is followed by the title of an English translation of the original work on which the film is based. The subsequent headings depend on the information available for each film, but include, as a rule, director, adaptation (which includes screenplay and dialogue), and main actors (some well-known French actors are known by their family names only). Further information and comments are added where relevant.

Much more than the Simenon novels discussed in this study, it has been a particularly challenging task tracking down many of the films listed below, only some of which have obtained official releases on disc, and in some cases I have had to rely on my notes on viewing the films from years ago. (I am grateful for several contributions by Howard Curtis for some of the films I have been unable to see.)

Only those films for which information can be verified through reliable sources have been included. The listings are therefore not complete. One film has been deliberately omitted, because it contains only a short sketch based on the Maigret short story ‘The Evidence of the Altar-Boy’, among other sketches. The title of the film is Brelan d’As, directed by Henri Verneuil, with Michel Simon as Maigret. It was released in 1952.

Maigret on Film

It didn’t take long for canny filmmakers to realise the great potential of Maigret as a recurring screen detective – not least for the fact that the books were already much loved by the time the first film adaptation appeared. The first actor to portray Maigret on screen was the celebrated Pierre Renoir in Night at the Crossroads/La Nuit du Carrefour. Apart from the nicely judged, understated performance by the actor, the film had another considerable advantage: it was directed in 1932 by the actor’s brother, the great Jean Renoir (director of the masterly La Règle du Jeu). This was, in fact, a good year for screen Maigrets, as another important director, Julien Duvivier, cast Harry Baur as the detective in La Tête d’un Homme, a solid if rather steadily paced outing that nevertheless honoured Simenon’s original conception.

Gallic screen Maigrets aside, the first English-language incarnation of the detective was delivered by one of Britain’s greatest character actors, Charles Laughton, in The Man on the Eiffel Tower, an adaptation of the novel A Man’s Head/La Tête d’un Homme. The supporting cast was shored up by a bushel of other reliable character stars: Franchot Tone, Burgess Meredith (who also co-directed the film with Laughton) and Wilfrid Hyde-White among them. As so often in his career, Laughton could not resist incorporating several of his larger-than-life mannerisms into his assumption of Maigret, with a theatricality some distance from the low-key characterisations of the novels.

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