Georges Simenon was living on a houseboat when his novel was published in 1931. Very shortly afterward, he was sitting on the deck of his boat, typing a new novel, when a large car drew up on the quay to which it was moored, and a stranger got out. It was Jean Renoir, a filmmaker Simenon admired but did not know; Renoir went straight up to him and made an offer for the film rights on the spot. Simenon accepted immediately and the deal went through with no further complications-- quite possibly the quickest and most straightforward sale of film rights to a novel in movie history. The two men were lifelong friends thereafter and Simenon was devastated by Renoir's death, some 47 years later.
The gloomy rural crossroads featured in the story was a real place and Jean Renoir knew it well, once calling it "perhaps the most depressing place on Earth". He rented an unoccupied house nearby and lived there with the skeleton crew he brought with him from Paris to make the film. Some crew members, he recalled, actually slept on the floor or in chairs, and he would often shoot the film in the middle of the night, sometimes more or less on the spur of the moment. Many small acting roles and minor functions behind the camera were taken by non-professional local people.
Several critics in 1932 noted that there seemed to be certain necessary scenes missing, and queried whether or not the film had been cut. Other sources suggested that some footage shot on location had been lost en route to the film laboratories in Paris. By the time the discrepancies had been discovered, Jean Renoir was already at work on another film and re-takes were impossible. Years later, after Renoir's death, Georges Simenon claimed that Renoir had been deeply unhappy and drinking heavily throughout the shoot (his first marriage had recently broken up) and he had simply neglected to film certain necessary scenes. Simenon also said he had been approached to appear in newly-filmed inserts in which he would explain what the missing footage would have contained--an absurd idea which he rejected out of hand.
According to French Cinema scholar Don Malcolm, this title is the first authentic example of "film noir".