Not to be mistaken with Jean Renoir’s La nuit du carrefour (1932) released six years earlier, Curtis Bernhardt’s Carrefour, based on a novel by John H. Kafka (no relation), is perhaps the earliest entry in the “amnesia noir” subcategory. Later emigrating to Hollywood, where he directed noirs like Conflict (1945) and High Wall (1947), Bernhardt immediately immerses us in the kind of fog that would go on to define film noir, the opening scene following a man who tosses a bag of blackmail money over a stone wall only to be surrounded and arrested by Paris police. We quickly move into a courtroom drama in which wealthy industrialist Roger de Vétheuil (Charles Vanel) is determined to prove that he is not a criminal named Jean Pelletier, who disappeared the same time de Vétheuil disappeared in the trenches of the Great War in 1917. Pelletier developed amnesia at the time of his vanishing and has relied on others, especially his wife Anna (Tania Fédor), to fill in the details of his life story. Two surprise witnesses arrive: de Vétheuil’s supposed former lover Michèle Allain (Suzy Prim) who becomes emotionally overwhelmed, and Lucien Sarroux (Jules Berry), who claims he witnessed Pelletier’s death, thereby validating de Vétheuil’s identity. It turns out, however, that these two witnesses may be in cahoots and using de Vétheuil’s situation as a blackmail opportunity. Replete with continental atmosphere, the film would be remade in Hollywood in 1942.