La nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Michel Galabru is a private detective in Paris in 1950. All the people he meets as he wanders around the music scene in Montmartre think of it as almost comically cliche, and he agrees. It's all standard cases, mostly following women to find their lovers for husbands. At the moment, he's working on recovering some jewelry for an insurance company. But when he finds the missing jewelry, he finds it with a dead American jazz musician. And that's the not only corpse he'll encounter.

The story is pretty standard. Galabru is knocked out a couple of times, youngsters jitterbug to cool jazz, and whenever there's a corpse, the film goes from Eastmancolor to black and white. I didn't find it difficult to identify the murderer, despite the lack of clues as Galabru wanders from one stereotypical location to the next. It's based on one of Leo Malet's "Nestor Burma" novels.

The movie is first a depiction of the (snobbish ,the press writes)residents of a fashionable district in the fifties .Beginning with a Boris Vian quotation,the atmosphere is depicted down to the smallest details:jazz in the cellars,Café De Flore,radio broadcasts,girls who resemble Juliette Greco (except for the nose),gays,existentialism,wealthy dandy (who watches "the most dangerous game" ) and the whole shebang.

This fascinating atmosphere and a young Daniel Auteuil's portrayal of a bisexual poet,a man with the child in his eyes, are the reasons to watch this first effort by Bob Swaim .The second part belongs to him and he overshadows veteran Michel Galabru as the resident private eye ,Nestor Burma .Mort Shuman (one half of the famous Pomus/Shuman team who wrote rock classics),who was fluent in French, portrays Germain Saint Germain a would be writer ,but his part is underwritten.

As for the detective story ,it is the low point of the movie:this affair of stolen jewels and murders is never exciting ,although the killer's motive for committing the crimes was not derivative for 1977.