A few years before commencing his unmatched streak of acclaimed noirs in Hollywood, director Robert Siodmak made Piéges (US: Personal Column) in France, and it’s a fascinating film: a noir sandwich with a musical comedy in the middle. The first part introduces Adrienne Charpentier (Marie Déa), a taxi dancer hired by the police to respond to romantic personal ads with the aim of finding the man who killed her co-worker. Halfway through, the film shifts to a musical-comedy tone in which, for example, Maurice Chevalier breaks into song while dining at a restaurant (the other patrons join in too), then switches back for a dark and suspenseful final half-hour. The tonal fluidity — or conflict, depending on how you look at it — may symbolize the tension between the two genres, crime and comedy, on which Siodmak had cut his teeth (crime eventually came out on top). The director’s visual mastery is abundant here: an unbelievable spiral nightclub studio set with a flamenco dancer in the center, so many painting-like compositions like the girl on a library ladder checking her shoe inside vast, vertical windows, a close-up of a black female trumpeter singing in English, a bleak goodbye on death row, etc. It’s a magnificent film that was remade by Douglas Sirk in 1947 as Lured starring Lucille Ball.