120, rue de la Gare (1946)
Directed by Jacques Daniel-Norman

Film Review

Léo Malet's celebrated fictional private detective Nestor Burma makes his screen debut in this frighteningly convoluted crime drama, another justly forgotten turkey from director Jacques Daniel-Norman.  On the face of it, it's hard to see how a film with such an enigmatic criminal investigator could have ended up such a dismal misfire - it ought to have been perfect film noir material.  In the hands of a more capable director, 120, rue de la Gare could so easily have been as gripping as John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, but the best that the clueless Daniel-Norman could come up with was an insipid, hopelessly muddled mystery that manages to lose the spectator's interest within ten minutes.  Dull and confused, it pales into insignificance when compared with subsequent screen outings for Nestor Burma - Bob Swaim's La Nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés (1976) and Nestor Burma, détective de choc (1981), not to mention the popular television series of the 1990s, early 2000s starring Guy Marchand.

Daniel-Norman's laughably uninspired direction is the main reason for the film's failure but another factor against it is the obvious miscasting of René Dary in the role of Nestor Burma, alias 'Dynamite'.  Dary was a competent actor but he was never a star, although he did shine as the infant hero of Louis Feuillade's Bébé films made between 1909 and 1915.  (Not many actors can match Dary's claim to have starred in around seventy films before the age of ten.)  In the dark days of the Occupation, Dary was one of the actors to have benefited from the defection to Hollywood of established stars such as Jean Gabin.   Before his Nestor Burma fling he had given an impressive performance as a likeable amateur sleuth in Richard Pottier's Huit hommes dans un château (1942), and therein lies the problem.  René Dary is fine as the clean-cut good guy, but he is just too nice and straitlaced a person to play someone as tough and morally ambiguous as Malet's hard-boiled 'tec.

There is an almost exact parallel between Dary's casting as Nestor Burma and Dick Powell's starring role in Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet (1944).  (The parallel is helped by the fact that the two actors are physically very similar.)  Before making this film, Powell was popular as a likeable juvenile lead and no one would have thought him capable of taking on nastier character roles.  His now iconic portrayal of Philip Marlowe in Dmytryk's film changed all that and salvaged his flagging career.  Alas, the same did not happen for Dary.  His failure as Nestor Burma was a serious blow to his career and pretty well put paid to his hopes of stardom after WWII.

Film Synopsis

'120, rue de la Gare' are the words of a dying man.  For private detective Nestor Burma it is the starting point for one of his most tortuous criminal investigations.  The first clue to the location of the mysterious address is provided by Bob Colomer, when he utters the same words after being shot as he disembarks from a train at the Gare de Lyon.  Convinced that the key to the mystery lies in Lyon, Burma heads for the city in the company of his journalist friend Marc Covet.  Here, his investigation leads him to Suzanne Parmentier, the daughter of a notorious gangster, who was thought to have died some years ago after pulling off a spectacular robbery...