Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

through windows, to provide the indispensable expressionistic touch. Myron Meisel
accounts for this distinctive feature of the director’s style:
Lewis also displays his penchant for objects in hard focus in the foreground while
the action takes place farther back in the frame. The death of the girl’s mother is
evoked through the metaphor of a dripping faucet and a steaming teapot, our view
of them obscured by the clutter of various other kitchen objects. All of these visual
devices converge in the stunningly designed climax, in which the complex motifs
of framing, objects in the foreground, reprised bells on the sound track, deep focus,
mirror images, and ratcheted light are orchestrated to the theme of realization.
(Meisel 1975:110)
Henri Cassin (Steven Geray), the renowned detective of the Paris Sûreté, falls in
love with an innkeeper’s pretty, young daughter Nanette Michaud (Micheline Cheirel),
while on an extended long due holiday (his first break after eleven years). One night,
Nanette disappears during her engagement party only to turn up dead later. Cassin reckons
that Leon (Paul Marion), her old boyfriend, is the suspect for her murder, but soon he is
also found dead. The high pressures of his job and the dissatisfactory love affair, with all
its implications of amour fou, are what has caused Cassin’s split personality, which kills
when away from his rational mind. This is most evident in the amazing final scene: as
Cassin lies dying of a bullet wound on the floor of the inn, he peers through the window
(the consistent visual motif of this film) and sees himself as he appeared when he first
arrived, as a seemingly unworried man. This image fuses with that of him as a disgraced
killer, whereupon Henri smashes the window in a vain attempt to eradicate both of his
“reflections”. Acknowledging his illness, perhaps for the first time, he exclaims: “Henri
Cassin is no more. I have caught him and killed him.”
Lewis’s visual style and his construction of unusual visual compositions seem to
constitute his eccentric approach to his subjects. As seen, the mise-en-scène in his films
highlights the physical (and often mental) entrapment of his characters, with, for instance,
Nina Foch framed behind a barred window (fig. 108) in My Name Is Julia Ross; or Peggy
Cummins and John Dall, at the rear of a claustrophobic diner with distorted walls that
appear to be closing in on them. The mise-en-scène and lighting in fig. 109, for example,
create a host of implications. One of the bars of the window is sharply reflected across
Annie Laurie’s face, cutting it into two parts, underlining her split personality. Her facial
expression confirms that she will not give up; it is her determination which (she believes)
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