Panique

Long before social media could whip up public frenzy and flash mobs, we got by remarkably well with word-of-mouth. Rumor, suspicion, and a willing crowd were all it took. This 1946 French film noir will haunt you.

A middle-aged woman is found murdered in a small French town. The eccentric, reclusive Monsieur Hire somehow knows who did it. The killer and his girlfriend—an amoral, high-functioning psychopath and a compliant femme fatale—conspire to frame him, exploiting Hire’s attraction to her and the townspeople’s distrust of his mysterious ways. Simmering suspicion erupts into hysteria with unexpected consequences amid lavish public funerals and a surreal bumper-car war.

Panique has sometimes been interpreted as an allegory for French complicity during the Nazi occupation. Poorly received upon its release—in part because of its unflattering portrait of French society—it is now regarded as a masterpiece of French film noir, a chilling depiction of persecution, prejudice, and the cruelty of the mob.

Panique’s bleak view of human nature was nurtured in depression and war. What makes it especially disturbing is that its townsfolk are so ordinary and familiar. They are not monsters; they are shopkeepers, neighbors, friends, and passersby who gradually surrender themselves to rumor and collective malice. Many French and American films of the period were imbued with postwar disillusionment, when noir found fertile ground in a world that had learned just how thin the veneer of civilization could be.

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