“Kill the murderer!” Before social media evolved to become the optimal venue for whipping up mob mentality and exacting social vengeance, such injustice was carried out face to face: through judgmental stares in the street, misinformed whispers in the local shops, and organically formed gangs that often took the law into their own hands. In Panique (US: Panic), director Julien Duvivier and leading man Michel Simon brilliantly and horrifically portray the result of these unfortunate human instincts, which were made far more intense in Europe by lingering fears and suspicions from the war (see also 1943’s Le Corbeau). Simon plays Monsieur Hire, a misanthropic loner who immediately falls for his pretty, new neighbor Alice (Viviane Romance) who was just released from prison after taking the rap for her boyfriend Alfred (Paul Bernard); the couple reunites in secret (a beautiful scene outside a church at night) to avoid exposing their relationship to the police, but Hire becomes aware. When a woman’s dead body is discovered a few blocks away and Hire tells Alice that he suspects her boyfriend is the killer (“She just went to heaven early,” Alfred later says remorselessly. “So what?”), Alfred orders Alice to seduce Hire to keep him quiet while slowly planting clues to shift suspicion onto him. Along with art director Serge Piménoff, Duvivier effectively crafts a crowded urban neighborhood replete with eccentric supporting characters (the butcher with seven children, the spiritualist with caked-on makeup and wig), apartments on top of each other, the obligatory funeral procession, and live music audible from various sets to emphasize the close quarters. Symbolism is also abundant: note the thrilling bumper cars scene in which Hire is cornered and rendered inert, or the chaos of the carnival at which a female wrestling match is abandoned by its audience who run to the next spectacle, a public accusation of murder. Duvivier’s poetic sorcery reaches its zenith, however, in the very last shot on the endlessly circling amusement ride as a man nearby sings about “the beauty of the world.”