Today’s lone arrival is a French restock of Pathé’s Blu-ray of “The Night Affair” by Gilles Grangier. The film stars Jean Gabin and Danielle Darrieux, who had previously appeared together in three pictures: Henri Decoin’s “The Truth About Bebe Donge” and the “La Maison Tellier” segment of the Max Ophüls anthology film “Le Plaisir” in 1952, plus Sacha Guitry’s “Napoleon” from 1955. Based on a novel Jacques Robert, Grangier put together the script with Robert and Michel Audiard (father of “A Prophet” director Jacques Audiard), who wrote the dialogue). Also on the film’s crew was first production assistant Jacques Deray, who would go on to direct a string of Alain Delon pictures a decade later that included “La Piscine,” “Borsalino” (which Coppola supposedly “borrowed” from extensively for “The Godfather”), and “Flic Story.”
“The Night Affair” is exceedingly hardboiled, even by 50’s French crime movie standards, opening with a red hot jazz band and references to drug use and prostitution within the first few lines of dialogue. This time out Jean Gabin plays Inspector Vallois, a laconic sleuth with a reputation for letting his boozing get in the way of his work who’s out to solve the murder of a nightclub owner. Along the way the takes up with the victim’s girl, a German hophead named Lucky who was with him at the time of his killing, and the question becomes whether Vallois is delaying his report because he’s genuinely falling for her or simply working the case in the hopes of uncovering what she knows.