The Wedding Guest (1962) User Reviews (3)

The Wedding Guest

[Prismark10 · 6/10 · 30 July 2022]

After talking to a condemned man in prison. He finds out that the man was blackmailing someone who once dumped a body in a canal.

Maigret 's search leads him to a bar in Northern France where the locals are having a boisterous party as a wedding takes place.

Soon Maigret is investigating another murder. A man called Feinstein was apparently shot dead by Basso who was fooling with the dead man's wife.

Feinstein demanded money from men who played around with his wife.

Soon Maigret narrows his search to a missing money lender who could had been the body dumped in the canal.

A complex novel would not had been a simple endeavour to adapt for a single television episode.

It shows here, it had an unfocused beginning. It was easy to guess just who the culprit is, even though the reasons why was not straightforward.

Pretty grim

[lucyrfisher · 9/10 · 30 July 2022]

Imagine finding yourself in a quiet country hotel that's periodically taken over by a group of middle-aged married couples who think they're real clowns. What could be grimmer than that?

The story starts in the condemned cell, as a doomed man decides to tell Maigret a story. Well, what can he lose? He's spotted a murderer at the above jolly hotel by the river. (Very well acted.)

Also playing a blinder is "Basso" - an actor who played cheeky chappies in his youth, now still clowning around, but with a serious character behind the, well, the painted smile.

The other reviewer didn't find the weekenders plausible - I felt I'd met them all.

A dark episode - and no Madame Maigret, she's in Alsace on holiday. At least Lucas has acquired a girlfriend!

A story trying to be clever and failing

[Sir_Oblong_Fitzoblong · 3/10 · 27 January 2022]

The main strand of this episode uses a well-worn plot idea: a group of friends meet regularly for weekends of drinking, horse-play, and childish games in an attempt to amuse themselves and escape the dreariness of day-to-day life, but beneath the surface are rivalries, jealousies, animosity, and personal inner tragedy.

Onto this strand is grafted one in which Mairgret tries to investigate a murder without a body, based on tantalizing information from a man convicted of another murder.

The problem is that the group-of-debauchees idea is very difficult to make plausible unless they are either upper-class rebels of the 1920s or teenage tearaways of the lower orders. In either case, they need to be convincingly young. The group in this story don't fit believably into any recognizable social stratum and are patently middle aged. Consequently the potential motives for murder as presented are hard to believe in and the general air of the episode is a curious mixture of silliness, flatness, and pretentiousness.

There is an interesting sequence of film at a race track which was bold for the time and context but goes on too long to sustain interest due to the (necessary) fixed-camera single-shot approach.

Frank Williams, in a very small part, doesn't actually say "Well reeee-ally !" but one expects him to at any moment and in every other respect he was clearly destined to take up the living of St Anselm's, Warmington-on-Sea.

And a spotting opportunity for Dr Who watchers is veteran Dalek John Scott Martin as an extra in arab getup.