This is a potentially outstanding thriller rendered mediocre by an inept journeyman director. The wonderful actress Madeleine Robinson is top-billed and deservedly so and whilst the plot - a good-time girl/concierge of an apartment building is murdered and virtually every tenant is in the frame - owes something to the pre-war (1939) Derriere la facade it also nods generously to Agatha Christie who possibly invented the multi-suspect crime story. Eric von Stroheim, who spent three separate periods in France pre and post second World War during which he made many, many more films than the one he is best remembered for, Renoir's Le Grande Illusion, weighs in with a nice turn as a peripatetic preacher who makes the rounds of strip clubs touting the gospel but the director lets himself down by a last minute denouement of the killer without offering a clue(s) as to the identity. Nevertheless it's well worth a look.
Review of Minuit... Quai de Bercy
