Watching the detectives

Can a British comedy icon play serious crime-drama? Rowan Atkinson’s MAIGRET is four TV movies, complete with a French cop’s stern demeanour and signature pipe. Police on trail of a serial killer in Paris have to persuade female officers to volunteer as bait, to catch a painter-turned-psycho whose obsessive mother (Fiona Shaw) and his domineering wife always protect their pampered man-child at any cost. 

Second story Dead Man better showcases Parisian 1950s settings, complete with WW2-damaged buildings filmed on Hungarian locations for vicious murders. No jokes about bad Czechs, please. 

Night At The Crossroads begins with the shooting of a Belgian jeweller. A mysterious one-eyed Dane is the suspect, and his nervous ‘sister’ is haunted by family disgrace. Missing diamonds, an illegal boxing club, a car chase down country lanes, add layers to puzzler about underworld temptations leading to gangster mayhem. Engagingly insightful questions posed by Maigret reveal corruption by a police colleague. 

Creepy menace at strip-club kicks off the final film where a blonde, who reported a plot against a ‘Countess’, is found strangled at home. There’s a brief sit-com sketch about a cat but Atkinson does not seem to mind. Chief Inspector Maigret’s gifts of ‘reading’ people are supported by empathy for crime victims, and willingness to protect innocents. The depth of this humanity, and official duty of caring, often proves decisive in cracking the most tangled of cases. So, not surprisingly, the spectres of neither TV farce Mr Bean or spy-fi movie-parodies of Johnny English make even a fleeting appearance here at all. 

Atkinson’s characterisation of the sleuth is always seriously sympathetic and far too kind for any keen sense of humour. Jokes usually require cynicism and certain levels of cruelty to provoke laughter. Comedy would be a sharp curse on this measured investigation of weakness and failure. Farce is always mean, but hard truth is never funny after people die from abuse or lies. That’s the appeal of this possibly unique version of Maigret.

From a police chief in Montmartre, to American gumshoe Sam enjoying a quiet 1960s lifestyle in rural France, Clive Owen’s MONSIEUR SPADE tackles a violent case involving slaughtered nuns, an unlucky teen heiress, and links to Algerian espionage. Hammett with a twist, here’s six episodes with pickled noir dialogue where an  emphysema-suffering tough-guy drives a Citroen and wears glasses, but swims nude, to amuse his neighbours, whether they’re British spooks or not. 

Local jazz-club owner Marguerite (Louise Bourgoin, heroine of Luc Besson’s The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adèle Blanc-Sec) lurks on periphery of plot that swerves around crypto-gifted chosen-boy Mahdi, wanted by everybody from the Vatican to CIA. This show might be for cynics only, because optimism looks deadly, especially when guns wait on both sides of a door. Is the “15 going on 50” troublesome girl really Spade’s daughter? Secrets of prejudice and revenge creep from past confusions to present dilemmas. 

There's a hatred of cemeteries because such land is a waste of garden spaces. Can moral debts ever be paid? Effective as character-study, and intriguing period spy-fi. Clearly, this is not a crazy sci-fi like the comic-book TV of Pennyworth, but its escalating situation tilts closer towards fatal tragedy for an idyllic town where (almost?) nobody can be trusted. Except, perhaps, Alfre Woodard - arriving in a Mercedes from across a bridge (a hostage-exchange scene, of course), to explode all the murky goings-on here, just like a classic whodunit finale.

Next week on WATCHING THE DETECTIVES
Only Murders In The Building - TV comedy with Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez, doing a New York crime podcast... where Sting is the first suspect.