Noirsville - the film noir

Monday, September 7, 2026

Il faut vivre dangereusement aka One must live dangerously (1975) A Flawed French Black Comedy Noir Parody

Written and Directed by Claude Makovski and Nelly Kaplan (A Very Curious Girl) .

With additional writing credit to Claude Veillot, and based on Raymond Marlot's novel "Les suicidés du printemps" aka The Spring Suicides.

The beautiful stylish Cinematography was by Jean Badal, with an excellent score by Claude Bolling.

The film stars Annie Girardot as Léone, Claude Brasseur as Richard Diquet Private Eye, Sydne Rome as Lorraine, Hans Christian Blech as Ritter, Roger Blin as Murdock, and Daniel Ivernel as Badinget.

Claude Brasseur as Richard Diquet

Sydne Rome as Lorraine

Annie Girardot as Léone

This is a one off film by Claude Makovski who was more known as an actor (Bande à part) and producer (A Very Curious Girl). It was a collaborative effort between Nelly Kaplan (who supposedly was the original genesis of the screenplay) with formative input from Makovski and Veillot who all worked together before.

In direction Makovski was assisted a lot by Kaplan (uncredited). It's a subtle parody of Film Noir tropes, Film Noir homage, with even a dash of Sally the Sleuth and Crime Does Not Pay vintage crime comics.

The tropes has our P.I. Richard "Dick" Diquet, "Private Dick," a wisecracking womanizer (Sam Spade a la Hammett as portrayed in the original 1931 The Maltese Falcon by Ricardo Cortez), and who in '74 is still wearing a classic trench coat. He drinks, smokes, carries a zippo and a roscoe (revolver) and drives a rag top '62 Peugeot 404 Cabriolet.

Dick's "Effie / Velda" in a French touch, is Léone an aspiring chef who runs the restaurant below Dick's office on the ground floor

Her side hustle is helping Richard on his cases by employing her gift of clairvoyance. The film takes place in the middle of the "Sexual Revolution" and Richard (a la Hammett and Spillane) takes full advantage of opportunities with the various women he encounters.

Again, there's a lot of Noir homages throughout the film. I caught a few of them but there are probably more that folks a lot more familiar with French and International Noir will pick up on.

For instance we get a homage to Ralph Meeker's opera record breaking sequence in Kiss me Deadly when Dick on the tail of Lorraine to a "Une cage à lapins" flop apartment house. He finds himself in the center courtyard where an old man has a hobby raising birds he has numerous cages scattered about. Dick asks the man which flop does the girl who just came through live in. The man starts playing dumb, so Dick starts feeding a French frank into the nearest cage, the old man still plays dumb. Dick getting impatient pulls the top off one of the cages and scatters all the birds in it. The old guy gets hysterical when Dick's about to repeat the action and reveals Loraine's apartment number. Its also a homage to Ralphie and his pet rat cages from Blast of Silence.

Dick's Zippo lighter failing to light may be homaging Mr, Brown and his lighter problem in the Big Combo, and Jake Gittes in Chinatown, his frequent attempts to light his cigarettes serve as punctuation marks.

There's a kinky orgy with masks that reminds me of Joe Sarno's Sin In The Suburbs, and also a double camera trick used by Howard Duff in Shakedown.

We get a two toned shoe wearing villain. This again references Kiss Me Deadly with its Dr. Soberin, Bruno from Strangers on a Train, and "Nate" Bledsoe from Twilight Zone's Noir episode Dead Man's Shoes.

Another Kiss Me Deadly ref is the death of Nick "VaVa Voom," Mike Hammer's garage mechanic. We also get a hanging dead woman reference from The Money Trap, and the aquarium sequence from Welles' Lady From Shanghai. Another ref is Dick and his cat as ref to This Gun For Hire, and The Long Goodbye.

One French Noir ref is the death from the speeding train from Un témoin dans la ville, there are probably more. There are probably quotes from other films one obvious one is from The Good The bad And The Ugly where Lee Van Cleef pulls a pillow over the head of his employer shoots him in the head through the pillow.

Story

The opening title sequence combined with Claude Bolling piece called train d'enfer is a real Visual grabber.

From there we meet our P.I. Richard "Dick" Diquet, he's a bedroom dick, window peeper, doing divorce work, sitting in a dive bar/restaurant taking pictures with a Minox 35 EL, of somebody's husband feeling up his gal pal.

The chick bartending figures out what he's doing and hits a buzzer on the bar top. The chef comes into the room, grabs Dick and hauls him into the kitchen and demands his camera or he'll shove his haed into a pot of boiling beans. Dick hands him a camera. The cook tosses it in the beans. Dick wisecrack's that it won't help the flavor. The cook roughs him up more asking who he works for, and Dick hands him a business card. The chief then tosses him out the back door knocking over some garbage cans. When Dick gets up and brushes himself off its revealed that he gave the cook a fake camera and retained the real one with the shots he took.

He drives back to the restaurant above which he has his office and meets Léone's assistant / waiter who supplies some of the comedy relief in the film.

Cut to his office / developing room where Dick is removing a wet print from a sink and hangs it to dry. In the office we meet the client a Mr. Ritter. Dick asks for his payment and then gives Ritter the photos. Ritter looks at the photos and then rips them in half. He also asks Dick for the negatives.

Hans Christian Blech as Ritter

Ritter tells Dick he has another even bigger job for him with a very important businessman. We also are introduced to the fact that Ritter has quite the sweet tooth during this sequence. This I know is another homage to some other Noir, but I just can't quite put the finger on it. It's similar to Sam Levene's police detective character with a yen for soda pop in Grand Central Murder, or Telly Savalas's Kojak with his tootsie pops

Any how, the big job is for an invalided businessman who says he wants Dick to track his mistress' every comings and goings with photos and detailed reports.

Roger Blin as Murdock lt.

Of course it all goes Noirsville because just like a classic hardboiled detective novel, when you start shaking things up, you never know what's going to fall out.

Noirsville

A montage of frames set to Claude Bolling's opening piece "train d'enfer" enjoy...

If you are familiar with Film Noir from its beginnings to today's Neo Noir this is a fun flick. You have to keep in mind its a parody, a spoof. The flaw is that the sequences are so well done that you forget that its a parody and you get too caught up in the story and expect it to be a serious film.

There are some Classic Hollywood Noir with far fetched plot points also, these are what this film parodies.

For instance there a sequence where Dick is on a train to Lyon and like his old ex police turned detective comrade, he gets knocked unconscious by a guy occupying a sleeping berth. This guy, is in turn, knocked out by the two tone shoe killer. Then, two tone shoes. places a pillow over his head, shoots him and. places the gun in Dicks unconscious hand, a frame up. Two tone pulls the emergency cord, and the train starts coming to a stop.

Dick comes to just before the train halts, he sees the gun in his hand and the dead man on the floor, and keeping the gun, runs to the vestibule, and jumps off the train just before it stops. He runs down the embankment and into the woods. He eventually come out on a highway and tries to flag down a ride. Nobody stops.

Who should come along but Léone, she's the clairvoyant partner. She had a premonition, she even made sandwiches she was so sure, and drove down that stretch of highway knowing that Dick would be there.

It's not so far fetched when you think of the plot of Dark Passage, no? Bacall just happens to be painting near the prison when Bogart breaks out. He get a ride but the guy gets wise and Bogart has to knock him out, and then change into his duds. Then Bacall drives by while this is going on, she sees the disabled vehicle and turns around, and goes back to it. A good samaritan.

There, she looks down the embankment see Bogart dressed standing next to a guy laying on the ground in his underwear, and then just nonchalantly pick up an escaped con, sentenced for murder. and takes him home with her.

Another scene has Bogey getting picked up by a cabby who just happens to know an on the skids plastic surgeon who performs a face lift on Bogey in his fleabag hotel, no waiting office.

This is the kind of coincidental and far fetched plot points that Il faut vivre dangereusement is parodying. The film also has three different possible endings, each more absurd than the other..

If you watch it for the references and the visual style you will enjoy it. 7/10