In the 1940’s, French director Henri Decoin made a string of excellent noirs, and the little seen La fille du diable (US: Devil’s Daughter) is one of the most unusual. The film’s first fifteen minutes immerse the viewer in an intense action sequence (gunfight between a gangster and the police) in a traditional noir setting (grey, urban) leading to a desperate escape to the countryside by hitchhiking. Once the fugitive gangster, Saget (Pierre Fresnay), is picked up by a drunk driver named Ludovic Mercier (Henri Charrett), he’s in for a chaotic and tragic joy ride. Returning to his hometown after spending most of his life in America, Mercier crashes the car and dies upon impact; unharmed, Saget seizes the perfect opportunity to try on a new life, so he buries Mercier’s body, steals his identity papers, and heads to town as an imposter. This is where the film takes on a dark cloud of small town paranoia a la Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le corbeau (1943). Saget makes himself at home in town but soon becomes entwined with a suspiciously kindhearted doctor (Fernand Ledoux) and a strange, irascible girl named Isabelle (Andrée Clément), aka “the devil’s daughter,” both of whom seem to know Saget is not who he claims to be. Although it veers occasionally into semi-comic territory, the film is a dark interpretation of human nature that leaves none of the main characters with any grace or redemption, perhaps quite appropriate for a production in a nation that had been under Nazi occupation just months before.