Quai des Orfèvres [Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1947]:
Director Clouzot had an affinity for film noir and for stories about poor saps led astray by obsession and sexual jealousy - a theme well served in many of the director's key films, but especially in this engaging and dramatic thriller. From the outset, the complex relationships between the characters and their jostling intentions set up the various domestic dilemmas that propel the narrative towards murder. In the second act things become murkier, with the introduction of the roguish Inspector Antoine and the formation of a gritty police procedural that feels very much within the same tradition of the works of Georges Simenon.
