His career cut short by his death at 53, French director Jacques Becker made just over a dozen films, including  three classic noirs (Casque d’Or, 1952; Touchez pas au Grisbi, 1954; Le trou, 1960) in the final decade of his life. His earlier filmography, on the other hand, comprised mostly romance and comedy, his only crime film, Goupi Mains Rouges (US: It Happened at the Inn), deftly combining ominous noir ethos with generous lightheartedness, such as the early sequence in which Léopold aka Red Hands (Fernand Ledoux) fakes a carriage breakdown to compel newly arrived Eugène (Georges Mollin) to sleep in his remote cabin which he makes out to be haunted. Eugène has been called home to the village of Charente from his cosmopolitan life in Paris by his father known as Moneybags (Arthur Devère) to marry Antoinette (Blanchette Brunoy), who’s already being courted by Tonkin (Robert le Vigan). When he arrives, however, he stumbles upon the dead body of the family’s 106-year-old patriarch, nicknamed the Emperor (Maurice Schutz), followed quickly by a second murder, that of the universally reviled Tisane (Germaine Kerjean) in the middle of the woods, and the discovery that someone has stolen the Emperor’s life savings from its hiding place. Overlapping whodunits ensue. The quantity of characters may be confusing for some, especially since they also refer to each other by unique nicknames. There’s a wide variety of noir sequences, occasionally bordering on horror, but Becker’s film also possesses a fairy tale quality with its timelessness, remote village setting, and exaggerated characters; a late scene has the young Jean (Albert Rémy) climbing a tree, bough by bough, shouting and reaching for the sun like a grounded Icarus.