In short: Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959)

aka Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case

The venerable Parisian police inspector Maigret (Jean Gabin) comes to his old hometown in the French countryside to help out the local Comtesse (Valentine Tessier). When Maigret was still a child, his father was the steward of the Comtesse’s estate, and little Maigret had a bit of a crush on the older girl; he’s now in the age where the past takes on the golden glow of nostalgia. So when the Comtesse sends him a letter asking for his help, presenting a threatening letter sent to her stating the time and date of her death, he’s obviously coming.

Even just arriving, Maigret realizes there are quite a few dubious characters around his old friend. There’s a melodramatic “secretary” and hobby art columnist, an even more melodramatic priest, and later on, we’ll also meet the Comtesse’s son, a whiny melodramatic alcoholic. Ironically enough, the Comtesse’s son will also turn out to be the murder weapon, more or less, for a fake newspaper article reporting his suicide is what’s going to kill her. Her weak, melodramatic heart, you see?

I did enjoy Jean Delannoy’s first Maigret movie with Jean Gabin, Maigret Sets A Trap quite a bit, but where that film is a psychologically insightful cat and mouse game only very slightly marred by a couple of too melodramatic performances, this one’s the embodiment of everything that was bad about French movies from the 50s, with only very little of all the things that was great about them. So the whole thing mixes a self-important, ponderous tone with finger pointing moralizing, a ridiculous murder method, and performances that consist of theatrical wallowing in badly faked emotion as expressed through stilted dialogue. It’s grating, to say the least, and certainly not improved by the film’s nostalgia for the good old days when everyone still knew their place.

The acting is made even more annoying through the immense contrast to the absurdly wonderful (given his surroundings) Gabin. For Gabin is his usual calm to phlegmatic self, expressing emotions through a slight change of tone, small shifts in his facial expression and posture - an actual actor who has somehow stumbled into a film peopled by idiots played by fools.


Technically, Delannoy’s direction is fine, full of theoretically clever little bits that would most probably be aesthetically satisfying and praiseworthy, if not for the terribly pompous air of it all, an air nothing in the script actually puts the appropriate effort in for at all. If all this sounds as if Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre has annoyed me quite a bit, I have made myself clear.