L'enquête de l'inspecteur Morgan

It's springtime in Mayfair and Dutch artist Hardy Kruger is having an affair with Micheline Presle. He's madly in love, but she's rather cold, and meet according to her schedule, like he's her dressmaker. He asks her to come away with him, but she refuses, and one day he finds her address and goes to her apartment to leave a note saying he can't take it any more. The door is open, so he goes in. Soon policemen are swarming the place and Detective Inspector Stanley Baker is asking a lot of questions, because The woman whose apartment this is has been murdered. There she is in the bedroom. Would you care to explain yourself, sir. Nothing more frightening than a policeman being polite about a corpse.

Joseph Losey, a very chilly director of emotionally and intellectually challenging movies, handles this in his usual icy manner, with Baker growing more and more tigerish as Kruger keeps insisting he didn't kill her, but unable to offer any proof. The audience is on Kruger's side. We saw him enter the apartment, We follow him around until the corpse is shown to him, and we feel his confusion; Baker's growing anger puts us on any side but his. Losey, however, is not on the side of anyone in particular. Both men seek the truth, and that's what's important.

This is basically a mystery story, but the mystery itself and its solution are not very satisfying. The best is that in the mean time we get to see some character study. And Losey's mise-en-scene is above average, as usual.

An excellent Stanley Baker in full Welsh-accented flow as the idiosyncratic DI David Evan Morgan unravelling the murder of a French woman at her oddly gaudy London flat. Baker keeps an unconventionally close rein on Hardy Kruger, who maintains his innocence whilst withholding enough information to keep the inspector interested in his relationship with the dead woman. Being found at the murder scene doesn't help the young Dutchman's situation. Some flashbacks give us the background to the tensions between the struggling artist and his muse. Downing a considerable quantity of milk (peptic ulcers were the cause of the commonest surgical operation in the late 1950s - fewer cigarillos would help Stanley) Morgan has to juggle his quest for the truth with the usual insistence from above that a top level government minister is not to be embarrassed by the outcome.

I saw this film almost sixty years ago when I was a nineteen year old "usherette" in a first run movie house in Sacramento, CA. Yes we did wear satin bell-bottoms, and carry a flashlight.

I have never seen this film since seeing it several times many years ago. It was the relationship between the older woman, and the younger man, that made me fall in love with Hardy Kruger and the film. This story line was both new and daring for the time. London was still in recovery from World War II, and it was not the city that most film viewers know now. I don't remember a story of class, I only remember a great hot love story.

The plot is pretty conventional Scotland Yard potboiler; Hardy Kruger suspected of a murder he didn't commit but the evidence looks bad. But the surprise of the film is a brilliant performance by Stanley Baker as the Police Inspector Morgan doing the investigation. Baker grew up in Wales near the home of the more famous Richard Burton, but he was every bit as good as an actor. His performance is tightly wound, with shafts of anger about the special treatment he is asked to give an upper class alternative suspect. Very different from the laid-back aristocrats that many films imagine populate the British police. It's a bit stagey and you won't find any of the car chases which litter so many police films. But the supporting cast are all good and Baker is a joy to watch.