“Is it cops or robbers?” “I don’t know, maybe both.” So goes an exchange when armed men break in and interrupt a fashion show in Henri Decoin’s Entre onze heures et minuit (US: Between Eleven and Midnight); the fashions on display are named after recently published crime novels like “I Shot a Cop” and “Kill all the Uglies.” Opening with a movie lover’s sequence in which viewers flow out of a theater questioning the film’s plausibility, Decoin’s film somehow manages to inject self-referential wit and humor without compromising the darkness and amorality of great noir. The magnetic Louis Jouvet plays a police inspector who learns he’s a dead ringer for the trafficker whose murder he’s investigating so he decides to impersonate one criminal to catch another. This involves duping the victim’s current girlfriend Lucienne (Madeleine Robinson), former mistress Florence (Gisèle Casadesus), and gangster associates. Decoin alternates fantastic crime suspense sequences (the shooting in the tunnel, the apartment break-in) with the challenges of relationships and social survival amidst postwar malaise (“Next war, I’ll work the black market,” says a runway model).
By Michael Bayer
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