Panique (Panik)

The unpopular outsider Monsieur Hire (terrific: Michel Simon) comes under suspicion because of his eccentric behavior when an old woman is murdered at a fairground. Only the beautiful Alice, with whom Hire is in love, shows him any affection - but it is an elaborate deception: Alice's boyfriend is the murderer and together they want to cast suspicion on Hire. Returning home from his wartime exile in Hollywood, whose penchant for happy endings disgusted him, Julien Duvivier stages his darkest work, a grimly expressionistic descent into the depths of cruel, manipulable human nature, culminating almost inevitably in a nightmarish confrontation with a lynch mob. Between moments of astonishing tenderness, a portrait of mass psychosis and morbidity emerges. Duvivier's second extraordinary adaptation of a Simenon novel after La tête d'un homme shows him to be an artist in his own right: instead of the cool, yet secretly compassionate gaze of the writer, he serves up an escalation of disgust (also a homecoming film in this respect). (Christoph Huber)

Photo: Austrian Film Museum