Aka - Les Caves du Majestic
This is the third and final film starring Albert Préjean as Inspector
Maigret. All of them were made while France was occupied by the Germans,
but you would never know it. The setting for most of this is the Majestic
Hotel, one of those grand old European hotels with large rooms, a huge kitchen
staff delivering delicious food to your room or the dining room and rhumba
lessons in the afternoon for ladies with nothing better to do and with an
eye to having some fun with the instructors off duty. When hotels were civilized
and a home away from home. And no riff-raff were allowed. There are no Nazis
to be seen but even the best hotels have murder on occasion. That is when
they call in Inspector Maigret. Nicely done mystery in which there are a
roomful of suspects in which Maigret has to determine the killer - even using
food to get to the bottom of it. It is a peculiar murder because all the
suspects seem very nice - no obvious killer - and a part of you doesn't want
anyone to be guilty. Not so much the victim. That seems obvious right from
the beginning who that will be.
A wealthy Swiss family is staying there - father, mother, young son and the
attractive secretary. The secretary being attractive being key perhaps or
possibly not but they lead the viewer down that road when the vitriolic wife
is strangled at 6 in the morning in the kitchen and left in someone's locker.
Her husband is supposed to be in Rome but is in fact at another cheaper hotel
with his secretary. Other skeletons emerge from the past with motives. It
ends with one of those finales in which they are all gathered into a room
and Maigret announces the killer.
All three of these films are satisfying if you are a Maigret or mystery fan.
This one perhaps a little less so because of how quickly Maigret is able
to gather information. In the books it can take weeks while Maigret waits
for information to dribble in from the provinces. They also make Maigret
a bit tougher - he gets socked in the jaw at one point and gets off the floor
and knocks the fellow out cold. Préjean is much smaller than
Maigret of the books or most films (Rowland Atkinson being an exception),
but the pipe and trench coat fit him well. I wish they had continued with
this series after the war, but they had served their purpose by entertaining
the French without riling the Germans.
