Brusque cops and femmes fatales: discovering Gilles Grangier’s forgotten noir gem

Le Desordre et la Nuit, shown as part of a retrospective for the great thriller director at Lyon's Lumiere film festival, is a well-crafted treat for fans of the genre

A big feature, and an even bigger pleasure, of this year's Lumiere film festival in Lyon is the retrospective for the French master of policiers and crime, Gilles Grangier, a director who enjoyed great commercial success in movies and later in TV from the 1950s to the 80s, working with actors such as Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura and the great screenwriter Michel Audiard (father of Jacques). He was a working-class film-maker who came up from the streets of Paris, and started in the movies as a stuntman, grip, prop boy, any job he could get.

Grangier is a name perhaps eclipsed now by Jean-Pierre Melville and made to feel obsolete in the 60s by the New Wave as he was making the kind of well-crafted, unpretentious genre pictures that the new generation of revolutionaries affected to despise (while admiring the Hollywood equivalent). But his movies here have been a revelation - the late Bertrand Tavernier, the founder of this festival, was always a great ally of Grangier's - particularly his amazingly dry, witty, briskly unsentimental lowlife crime melodrama Le Desordre et la Nuit from 1958. This thriller was adapted by Grangier and Audiard from a novel by the French wartime journalist Jacques Robert, celebrated for his 1945 reports from Berlin and being one of the few writers who saw the inside of Hitler's bunker.