The brilliant 1950 noir The Sound of Fury begins with a blind street preacher warning passersby that “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” If you think about it, this verse from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians could work as an epigraph for all of film noir. It certainly works to…
Maigret and the Headless Corpse by Georges Simenon is the 47th book in the Maigret series, where a man’s dismembered body is found in a canal and only Maigret can uncover the killer. Maigret and the Headless Corpse was the 47th mystery Georges Simenon wrote about the Chief Superintendent of the Paris Police, and it might…
The Night at the Crossroads by Georges Simenon is the seventh book in the Maigret series—a sensational tale of deceit and back-stabbing in an isolated community. The Night at the Crossroads was Simenon’s seventh book in the Maigret series, released in the insanely prolific year of 1931. After the publication of the first book in the…
The Grand Banks Café by Georges Simenon is the eighth book in the Inspector Maigret series, a gripping novel set in an insular fishing community. There’s a subgenre of mystery fiction that we might call the Interrupted Vacation. This plotline finds our hero on holiday when—wouldn’t you know it—a body pops up, and the detective…
Maigret, Lognon and the Gangsters by Georges Simenon is the 39th book in the Maigret series, where Maigret goes up against a group of American gangsters and finds he just might have met his match. Maigret, Lognon and the Gangsters (aka Maigret and the Killers) was the novel that made me a Maigret fan. I…
The Belgian novelist Georges Simenon was a monster. I’m not talking about his failures as a human being, which apparently included being a faithless husband, a wartime opportunist, and a problematic father. No, I mean, he was a monster in the sense that he worked like a beast. Over the course of his decades-long career,…
Every film that Orson Welles made was distinctively an Orson Welles movie. Even something like The Stranger, which was Welles’s one attempt to make a standard studio film, still ends up looking like an Orson Welles movie. Of all the films he made, however, there might not be a more “Wellesian” Welles picture than F…
Falstaff might just be Orson Welles’s greatest film. Welles himself thought so, and many among his legion of devoted fans think so. That the film remains largely unseen in America has little bearing on this opinion. In his home country, Welles is still most closely associated with Citizen Kane and The Third Man, but among…
I think the chief accomplishment of Orson Welles’s The Trial is that it so fully traps us in its nightmare world. The movie is an adaptation of Kafka’s novel about a man named Josef K who wakes up one morning to find that he is being persecuted for some unknown offense. K stumbles from one…
Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil is one of the great pieces of cinematic trash. It’s a frantic film, wildly over the top, in love with its own squalor, infatuated with the feel and smell of decay. Among the director’s attempts at pulp, it is his masterpiece. At its center is Welles himself, joyously grotesque in…
