Lucien Baroux

Jacques Baumer

Jules Berry

Gaby Morlay

Elvira Popescu

Michel Simon

André Lefaur

Gaby Sylvia

Andrex

Simone Berriau

Erich von Stroheim

Betty Stockfeld

Jacques Dumesnil

Missia

Paul Faivre

Aimé Clariond

Raymond Segard

Marcel Orluc

Marguerite Moreno

Gabrielle Dorziat

Jean Daurand

Robert Ozanne

Julien Carette

Elmire Vautier

Lina Darwils

Claude Sainval

Raymone

Jean Joffre

Lise Courbet

Marcel Simon

Georges Bever

Georges Malkine

Rivers Cadet

Franck Maurice

Robert Moor

Jean Wiener

Yves Mirande

Roger Doucet

Hélène Flouest

Henri Nassiet

Georges Lacombe

Max Kolpé

Victor Arménise

Robert Juillard

Jacques Robin

Lucien Aguettand

André Gailhard

Jacques Henri-Robert

Marthe Poncin

Marie Le Bars

Lucien Pinoteau

Robert Ivonnet

Madeleine Lefèvre

Louis Demasure

Igor Keldich

Robert Vernay

Crime

Comedy

list2

Derrière la façade

Régina

France

Sigmund  Kühßeir

**Behind the Facade (1939)**

A crime has been committed in a very respectable Parisian apartment building... Which of the tenants is the murderer? A shocking investigation for a series of sketches. It also features a fabulous cast of stars from the 1930s/1940s: Jules Berry, Michel Simon, Erich Von Stroheim, Elvire Popesco, Carette, Gaby Morlay, Simone Berriau... Lucien Baroux as Commissaire Boucheron, a policeman from the Quariter, who investigates the murder of a building's owner, and Jacques Baumer as Inspector Lambert, from the Sûreté, a more prestigious service than the local police station...

_Behind the Facade_ is undoubtedly one of the most up-to-date and revealing films of the immediate pre-war period, of which Yves Mirande was one of the princes: a man of the theater, a man of wit and a man of the salon, he, like Sacha Guitry, enjoyed every success. His plays triumphed on the boulevard, several were adapted for the screen, he wrote screenplays and dialogues, and sometimes tried his hand at directing.

In 1938, he had conceived and directed the excellent _Café de Paris_ (also directed by Georges Lacombe). A crime film set in this Parisian hot spot on New Year's Eve. Perfectly respecting the classic three-unit rule, it featured a police investigation following the murder of a press magnate. The customers present at the time of the crime, forced to remain on the premises, were successively interrogated, a convenient pretext for the appearance of Mirande's star friends, one after the other and for a few minutes at a time. Jules Berry, Véra Korène, Pierre Brasseur, Simone Berriau, etc.

_Café de Paris_ was a great success on release: the producers and the Régina company immediately asked Yves Mirande to undertake another work based on the same principle: Derrière la Façade, also technically supervised by Georges Lacombe, was even more brilliantly performed: like Guitry, Mirande loved actors, and knew how to make them love him.

The plot is almost the same as in _Café de Paris_, only the location has changed: this time, the crime is committed in a tenement building, and it's the residents who two rival policemen will try to get to talk to each other in order to uncover the murderer of one of the tenants. Again, a pretext for sketches, but of constant interest: the film is certainly well made, and we have fun recognizing the faces, and there are many of them. Almost all of them are pre-war greats, but through them, Mirande shows the whole of self-satisfied, egotistical society, with its prejudices and pettiness.

As is often the case with fashionable people, Yves Mirande is perfectly placed to be aware of the imperfections of the community in which he lives; if we can't suspect him of having wanted to stigmatize, let alone awaken, the fact remains that he showed here an astonishing, undoubtedly unconscious lucidity. If society is the place where the human comedy is played out, the boulevard, theater or cinema, is its microcosm.

It's no coincidence, for instance, that Erich Von Stroheim's character is featured in _Behind the Facade_: a German, or more generally an arrogant foreigner, recently naturalized as a French citizen, who shamelessly rips off "real" citizens, is responsible for the stagnation Mirande senses, and whom the film singles out for popular vindication. Obscure feelings, muted anxieties: images of a decomposed France, soon to be brought down by a conflict it dreads but dares not confront. It's the France of Munich on parade, with comedy ministers and bourgeois, cocottes and stuffy aristocrats, in a ballet that closely resembles a dance of death.

Français

Behind the Facade

Behind the Facade

" He's a loser, he gets off to a bad start, but when he wants to, he always has the last word: Justice ! "

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