Behind the Facade

Behind the Facade (1939)

A crime has been committed in a very respectable Parisian apartment building... Which of the tenants is the murderer? A shocking investigation for a series of sketches. It also features a fabulous cast of stars from the 1930s/1940s: Jules Berry, Michel Simon, Erich Von Stroheim, Elvire Popesco, Carette, Gaby Morlay, Simone Berriau... Lucien Baroux as Commissaire Boucheron, a policeman from the Quariter, who investigates the murder of a building's owner, and Jacques Baumer as Inspector Lambert, from the Sûreté, a more prestigious service than the local police station...

Behind the Facade is undoubtedly one of the most up-to-date and revealing films of the immediate pre-war period, of which Yves Mirande was one of the princes: a man of the theater, a man of wit and a man of the salon, he, like Sacha Guitry, enjoyed every success. His plays triumphed on the boulevard, several were adapted for the screen, he wrote screenplays and dialogues, and sometimes tried his hand at directing.

In 1938, he had conceived and directed the excellent Café de Paris (also directed by Georges Lacombe). A crime film set in this Parisian hot spot on New Year's Eve. Perfectly respecting the classic three-unit rule, it featured a police investigation following the murder of a press magnate. The customers present at the time of the crime, forced to remain on the premises, were successively interrogated, a convenient pretext for the appearance of Mirande's star friends, one after the other and for a few minutes at a time. Jules Berry, Véra Korène, Pierre Brasseur, Simone Berriau, etc.

Café de Paris was a great success on release: the producers and the Régina company immediately asked Yves Mirande to undertake another work based on the same principle: Derrière la Façade, also technically supervised by Georges Lacombe, was even more brilliantly performed: like Guitry, Mirande loved actors, and knew how to make them love him.

The plot is almost the...