Panique (Julien Duvivier, 1947)

“A tingling, compact, kaleidoscopic thriller!”—Film Comment

The noirish Panique, the first film Julien Duvivier (Pépé le moko) made in France after a wartime exile in the US, follows the buzz created in a Paris suburb after a woman is murdered in a churchyard. An eccentric outcast and Jew (played by Michel Simon) is everyone’s suspect, but a sociopath (Paul Bernard) is the guilty party who tries to frame the oddball with the help of a just-sprung-from-jail beauty (Viviane Romance). (91 mins., DCP)