The hour of Léon Bisquet
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The hour of Léon Bisquet |
| Country of production | D / HUN |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1986 |
| length | 85 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 6 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Lutz Büscher |
| script | Egon ice cream |
| production | André Libik |
| music | Klaus Doldinger |
| camera | András Szalai |
| cut | Éva Palotai |
| occupation | |
| |
The Hour of Léon Bisquet is a crime film based on the novel Le nègre (German: The Negro ) by Georges Simenon . The German-Hungarian television production was first broadcast on August 18, 1986 on ZDF . Klaus Schwarzkopf played the title role of Léon Bisquet .
action
Léon Bisquet is station master in the small northern French town of Versins near Amiens , where a slow train only stops in the morning and in the evening. His wife has died, the daughter, who the village gossip wants to know that she was actually conceived by the pharmacist, has left him to move to town. He lives alone with his parrot Coco, plays the recorder for himself and is not taken seriously by anyone in town. But he vows that one day he will show everyone.
In Versins, the wealthy Patriarch Cadieu has just passed away, and after his son, who emigrated to Africa, is already dead, there is speculation that the inheritance will go to the nephews Jacques and Nicolas. While Léon thinks Jacques, the owner of the Hôtel du Roy , is a man of honor, he is still full of grudges against the bon vivant Nicolas, owner of a brick factory , who once seduced and abandoned his daughter Antoinette and whom he blames for bringing her into the City moved away.
After Cadieu's death, two people surprisingly turn up in town: On the one hand, Antoinette stays with her father and shows great interest in the deceased's will, which is why she even approaches the notary Barthou. On the other hand, Bisquet sees a colored man jumping out of the night train, who is found dead next to the train tracks the next morning. Commissioner Lamotte, who has traveled from Amiens, is investigating murder and clarifying the dead person's identity. It is Honoré Cadieu, the grandson of old Cadieu from Timbuktu . If he was still before his nephew in the order of succession, the entire fortune of his grandfather would have gone to him.
Léon Bisquet is the only one who watched the arrival of the colored man and saw him head towards the city. He has finally acquired a knowledge that has to be taken seriously. But he withholds his observation from the inspector, whom he believes he is particularly suspicious of, and instead seeks out his intimate enemy Nicolas to blackmail him. The latter issues a promissory note for 200,000 francs, thus indirectly admitting complicity in the crime. When the railroad attendant returns in the evening, his parrot Coco is dead on the ground: He has eaten a poisoned banana that was actually intended for Léon.
While Commissioner Lamotte is investigating the attempted murder of Bisquet, Antoinette manages to smuggle her father out of the house unnoticed by the Commissioner. The heavily drunk man wants to confront Nicolas, and Antoinette leads him to the abandoned brickworks in the middle of the night. It is not Nicolas who turns up there, but Jacques, and it turns out that Antoinette has been his lover for years and has made common cause with him. Without pitying Léon, who she knows is not her biological father, she watches as Jacques tries to kill the person who knows it. At the last moment the police can intervene and arrest the criminal couple. Inspector Lamotte's interest was never in the innocent railroad attendant, but in his supposed daughter, whom he had suspected ever since she suddenly appeared. He doesn't want to know that Léon tracked down the two nephews before him, otherwise he would have to arrest the railroad attendant for blackmail. So everything stays the same in Versins: Nobody takes Léon Bisquet seriously. In the evening he covers the empty parrot cage and plays the recorder by himself.
Novel
The novel Le nègre is one of the less well known works of Georges Simenon . In its German translation Der Neger in particular, it is one of the Belgian writer's works that have not been published for a long time, which Oliver Hahn from maigret.de attributed to the politically incorrect title, among other things . Simenon wrote the novel from April 8-16, 1957 in Cannes . In the same year it was published by Presses de la Cité. Two years later, the first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau followed at Kiepenheuer & Witsch , before Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Linde Birk in 1979. In 1964, based on the novel, SWF and WDR produced a radio play adapted by Gert Westphal . Among others, Walter Andreas Schwarz as the narrator and Robert Rathke as Theo spoke .
The novel has a few details that differ from the film version. The protagonist here is called Théodore Doineau, known as Théo, who lost an eye in his youth and was abandoned by his wife instead of his daughter because of Cadieu. What has remained, however, is the figure of a typically Simenon anti-hero, a “sympathetic 'raté'” (failure), as Simenon's biographer Stanley G. Eskin puts it, for whom Théo's life is “a collection of tragic-comic humiliations” that end the railway attendant gets drunk, wants to hug a sleeping dog as a fellow sufferer and is bitten by it.
reception
Der Spiegel saw a “subtle TV game based on a novel by Georges Simenon” and judged: “Excellent in the leading role as railway attendant Bisquet: Klaus Schwarzkopf.” Adolf Heinzlmeier and Berndt Schulz described a “multi-faceted character role for Schwarzkopf”. Video.de spoke of an “exciting television film” and a “skilfully staged, very sensitive character study of the insignificant petty bourgeoisie”. In the title role, Klaus Schwarzkopf is “in top form”. In addition, "Günter Mack shines in the role of investigating Commissioner Lamotte."
Web links
- The hour of Léon Bisquet in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The hour of Léon Bisquet at pidax-film.
- The hour of Léon Bisquet at film-rezensions.de.
- The hour of Léon Bisquet at tv-kult.com.
Individual evidence
- ↑ The forgotten novels on maigret.de.
- ↑ a b The Negro on maigret.de.
- ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
- ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 107.
- ↑ The Negro in the HörDat audio game database .
- ↑ Le nègre in the bibliography of Yves Martina.
- ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 349.
- ↑ Television Thursday July 30th In: Der Spiegel . No. 31 , 1987, pp. 161 ( online ).
- ↑ Television Monday, August 18, In: Der Spiegel . No. 34 , 1986, pp. 190 ( online ).
- ^ Adolf Heinzlmeier and Berndt Schulz: Lexicon "Films on TV" (extended new edition). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-89136-392-3 , p. 438
- ↑ The Hour of Léon Bisquet ( Memento of the original of July 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at video.de.
