The Murderer Lives at Number 21

The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (L'assassin habite au… 21, 1942) is a French mystery with a comic streak that you can watch online on iFILM. It marks the directing debut of Henri-Georges Clouzot, who would later make The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques.

A killer stalks nighttime Paris, leaving calling cards signed "Monsieur Durand" on each corpse. The trail leads Commissaire Wens to a boarding house on Rue Junot, where a houseful of eccentric tenants share one roof — and one of them is the murderer. Wens moves in disguised as a pastor and starts pulling the threads. The catch: the evidence points not to a single suspect but to several. Pierre Fresnay drives the investigation while Suzy Delair plays a brassy aspiring singer who keeps inserting herself into the case.

Clouzot folds a locked-house whodunit into rapid-fire banter and a gallery of vivid oddballs. Shot in occupied France for the Continental studio, it stays remarkably light on its feet — a rare mystery that entertains as much as it puzzles. Stream The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (1942) online on iFILM.