Word: maigret
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Such a role requires little more of Edward Fox than looking the part, which he does. But a platoon of expert character actors, led by Michel Lonsdale as a Maigret-like master of the hounds, and including such worthies as Eric Porter, Cyril Cusack and Delphine Seyrig, give a human resonance to the film. Author Forsyth, a dealer in stereotypes, never managed that. Best of all, Zinnemann understands what the oldtime action directors knew instinctively: violence and death do not arrive in pompous slow motion but shock us with their suddenness. Yet Zinnemann's handling of violence is tasteful...
...with Simenon's Inspector Maigret, exposure to Van der Valk is likely to prove infectious. Even when the story seems to unwind in slow motion, Van der Valk's reflective concern for the role of character in crime makes the trip worthwhile. The prizewinning Criminal Conversation (1966), for instance, presents an Amsterdam society doctor, highly intelligent but neurotic and febrile, who is unprovably guilty of murder. In a long series of informal conversations, Van der Valk, in effect, kills the man with kindness and understanding, finally inveigling him into admitting his crime by laying bare the poverty...
...emotional gap is virtually infinite. Take, for example, the reliable litmus of crime. As two new films demonstrate, the accounts of evildoer and pursuant vary enormously with the turf. The favored French mode is the grittily realistic roman policier, in which the detective, like Simenon's Inspector Maigret, is presumed human, hence flawed. In England both criminal and captor implicitly play the gentlemanly hare-and-hounds game-a legacy of what W.H. Auden called the "guilty vicarage" tradition...
...thieves who in August 1963 made off with more than $7,000,000 from a Glasgow-to-London mail train. Closing that case was the capstone of a 34-year career in which Butler, according to admiring colleagues, combined the intellect of Sherlock Holmes with the persistence of Inspector Maigret...
Canny in Court. By the end of last year, Gardner's 140 books had sold a total of 170 million copies in the U.S. Among fellow mystery writers, only Georges Simenon, the Belgian creator of the Inspector Maigret stories, surpassed Gardner in output or ranks with him in sales...