In short: La dame d’onze heures (1948)

Clearly rich French adventurer and man about town Stanislas-Octave Seminario (Paul Meurisse) – called SOS by all and sundry because they need all the help they can get, one supposes – has just returned to France from some colonial adventuring somewhere in Africa. One of the first things he does is to visit the Pescaras, one suspects mostly because he’s already had an eye on the family’s daughter Muriel (Micheline Francey) when last he was in France. He’s a bit too late for romancing, though, for Muriel now has her very own fiancée, pharmacist Paul Wantz (Pierre-Louis).

Fortunately, SOS’s upper lip is as stiff as if he were British, and adventure is calling anyway: for father Pescara (Pierre Renoir) has been receiving mysterious – and pretty vague – blackmail letters for quite some time now. It is obvious to our hero that the elder Pescara knows more about the rhyme and reason of the situation than he lets on, but when the man is murdered, SOS starts on a thorough investigation.

Jean Devaivre’s La dame is a pretty strange film. In part, it’s your typical French melodramatic mystery of its time, made with the expected self-important gestures, full of characters who seem to be absurdly full of themselves, with dialogue that aims for the poetic but rather often achieves the constipated. But it also seems to be highly influenced by the noir, adding many an element of visual disquiet and curious intensity to its deeply bourgeois style of mystery. Intensity really seems to be Devaivre’s thing, so much so that things sometimes border on self-parody; but just as often the film reaches a pulpy and stylistically free-floating energy that must have perked up the ears of quite a few future nouvelle vague filmmakers, if they ever encountered the film.

Devaivre packs a lot of stuff into the film, too, filling it to the brim with comedic relief butlers, perfectly pointless stage magicians, romance, late 40s style punch-ups, and red herrings – a viewer might get drunk or confused by all of it. Even better, the film then adds moments of great inventive eccentricity, like an important flashback being achieved via our hero reading a long, long, very long stenotype we see unrolled to nearly hide the whole floor of his room, until the whole mystery plot reveals itself as the filmmaker’s excuse to do whatever the hell he’s interested in doing in any given scene. This might not be terribly enjoyable for fans of strict formalism in their movies but really results in a pretty joyous film that just hits whatever stylistic aim its director had at any given day.