Panique

Panique is a French film directed by Julien Duvivier, made in 1946 and released in 1947, starring Michel Simon and Viviane Romance. In 1989 Patrice Leconte remade the film as Monsieur Hire, with the title rôle played by Michel Blanc.

Plot

The strange and slightly unsettling Monsieur Hire is suspected of a crime. A crowd tracks the man down, who seeks escape on the roof of a building.

Comment

"After the war [many] narratives were spent on some kind of revenge. Marcel Carné's Les portes de la nuit, Robert Bresson's Les dames du Bois de Boulogne , Georges Lacombe's Martin Roumagnac, - the harrying of a Jew to his death in Duvivier's Panique, and a number of Simenon and Steeman thriller adaptations rife with violence and revenge - all of these films attest to a need to project the immediate past on to a different set of narratives that are removed from the immediate arena of guilt (although Panique comes uncomfortably close). Dark social realism is to be found in a considerable number of films during the five-year period after the end of the war. The films of Henri-Georges Clouzot and Henri Decoin are the most remarkable in this context in their fierce, almost cynical pessimism, but the works of Yves Allégret and Julien Duvivier in that period come close on their heels." ^[1]

References

External links

• Panique at the Internet Movie Database