Quai des Orfèvres

36 Quai des Orfèvres, inside and out

The eponymous location of Clouzot's 1947 film Quai des Orfèvres is never actually shown from the outside. This is surprising, given how common it is for films involving the police judiciaire to show its distinctive exterior before presenting scenes set inside. Here are 40 films from between 1927 and 2014 that do show the PJ headquarters:

Alexandre Arcady's 2014 film 24 jours: la vérité sur l'affaire Ilan Halimi was shot within the Quai des Orfèvres premises, with the full cooperation of the authorities. The Préfecture de Police has even posted photographs of the shoot on its own website:

These are views of the courtyard, which many films have been able to use as a location, as here, for example, in Hervé Bromberger's Identité judiciaire (1951) and Maurice de Canonge's Police judiciaire (1958):

It has been claimed that Arcady's 24 jours was the first film to be allowed inside the premises, but several sequences of Police judiciaire were clearly shot inside the real buildings. An early sequence shows a police inspector in a corridor of the nearby Palais de Justice, from which he takes the stairs that lead to police headquarters:

Once inside the PJ, most of the staircases and some of the corridors we see are, I think, real:

Police judiciaire shows the technical side of crime investigation in detail, with scenes in authentic-looking work spaces:

I think that all of these are the actual rooms at the Quai des Orfèvres. I know one of them definitely is, from a comparison with the reportage that Jean-Philippe Charbonnier undertook the following year. Here are two images of the same space, a photograph by Charbonnier and a scene from Police judiciaire:

The film, like the photograph, is the real thing, not a reconstruction.

The offices in which the detectives work, on the other hand, do look like studio constructions:

None is a match, at any rate, to this photograph by Charbonnier of an office at the Quai des Orfèvres:

I haven't seen any filmic representation of a Quai des Orfèvres office that shows the river, but an authentic-looking view through the window is a common realism in PJ-set films:

Quai des Orfèvres (Henri-Georges Clouzot 1947)

Identité judiciaire (Hervé Bromberger 1951)

Police judiciaire (Maurice de Canonge 1958)

Maigret tend un piège (Jean Delannoy 1958)

Maigret voit rouge (Gilles Grangier 1963)

In several of these the building seen through the window is this, known as Vert Galant, at 42 Quai des Orfèvres:

It was designed by Henri Sauvage and completed in 1932. In Police judiciaire we get a view of the building from what is clearly a window at police headquarters:

This shot is further evidence that the film had been granted unusual access to the premises. Views of this building through windows in films without that privilege all appear to be of carefully placed photographs, as here, in Clouzot's Quai des Orfèvres:

Even Police judiciaire resorted to this artifice to give the illusion that studio-made rooms were in fact real locations. The real view of Sauvage's apartment building closes a studio-shot scene in which the detective opens his window and looks out:

Across the counter-shot we switch from a photograph of the view to a film of it.

I'll close with a more striking instance of the use of a photograph from this film. The same detective is in conversation with his colleague in front of the same window, with a photograph as backdrop. They finish talking and leave the shot, but the camera remains fixed on the view:

As we contemplate the view, with the Pont Neuf beyond, the light dims and a lamp is lit on the bridge, followed by lights in two windows of the building:

This moment of trucage is a reminder that, however authentic its representations, a realist film can always succumb to the temptations of artifice.

See here for a post about the maps in Police judiciaire.

For the Quai des Orfèvres in episode 3 of Feuillade's Fantômas, see here.

Here are photographs of Georges Simenon, outside and inside the PJ precincts: