The small port town of Concarneau is gripped in fear. A loveable drunk has been shot in the streets in a seemingly motiveless crime. His three best friends, the local doctor (Robert Le Vigan), a wannabe aristocrat (Jacques Henley), and a yellow-pages journalist (Fred Marche) are informed they will be next through the medium of an anonymous note attached to a brick. And thus the cycle of murders continues, each one heralded by the appearance of the titular ugly, large, yellow dog. The famous Parisian police inspector Maigret (Abel Tarride) is called to investigate.
"The Yellow Dog" is a fairly pedestrian retread of one of Georges Simenon's lesser novels the problem of which lies not so much in the intriguing premise as in the ludicrous turns the plot takes. Director Jean Tarride's dullish adaptation does little to fix this, opting instead to merely follow the action with as little invention as possible.
The plot also isn't helped by the fact that Tarride seems to have no feeling for pace. This 69-minute movie is tiresomely padded out with such insignificant distractions as frequent non-sequiturs with a travelling salesman (Jean Gobet), the grating comedic routines of Maigret's buffoon assistant (Robert Lepers), and infuriatingly drawn-out sequences of people walking in, out and through rooms. Now, bad comic relief and poor pacing are part-and-parcel of early talkies but the extent to which Tarride's film suffers from these ailments is astounding. This is in part also because the scenes which are actually important to the plot tend to be so short and develop so quickly that you often miss their importance. For instance, the discovery of the third murder occurs in an almost silent scene that passes so quickly that I was confused in the finale about why the character who was murdered was no longer in the picture. It was only my memory of the novel that helped me keep track of what was going on.
Most of the film takes place in cheaply built, overlit sets foregoing any possibility of atmosphere or stylishness. The main set of the film, the town inn, looks uncannily like a sitcom set. The walls even wobble when the doors are closed. All this is amateurishly shot by Nikolai Toporkoff. The framing in this film is truly awful to the extent that more often than not the centre of the screen is empty while all the action seems to take place on the edges or sometimes even beyond them. All while the studio lights blaze reflecting in windows and ruining the mood of the story.
In the centre of all this is Abel Tarride as Maigret, a poor leading man, sluggish and listless and consistently bored. Rarely does he so much as raise his voice, let alone emote. In fact, in most of his scenes, he looks like he's looking for an empty chair to sit in. This is curious, as at moments, a light seems to shine from behind Tarride's eyes and great intelligence and wit is reflected in them. Sadly, these moments are brief and far between. One senses that in a better movie he could have been a decent Maigret but in this one, he just looks tired and ill at ease. The rest of the cast barely registers on screen.
"The Yellow Dog" is a stagy, uninteresting retelling of a badly-plotted Simenon novel and as such, it is not worth seeing. I doubt it is much worse than any of the rest of the 1930s cheapie thrillers made by the truckload in Britain and America, but as I wouldn't recommend those either I won't give "The Yellow Dog" any slack. Lacking in atmosphere or drama, it is a drawn-out flop.
