Maigret (TV Series) The Cactus (1961) User Reviews

Maigret goes 'undercover'

[Tony-Holmes · 8/10 · 27 March 2022]

Well, sort of undercover, as everyone in the apartment house knows who he is! This is probably the best episode so far of the first series of Rupert Davies as Maigret.

Shows him being observant, and getting inside the heads of the suspects. Eventually he works out why a few things don't look right, and sets a trap.

I saw these shows when they originally went out (early 60s) and they were very popular. I've now read many Maigret books, and can understand how hard it was to adapt the stories to fit into an hour show (later series are 90mins, or a whole 2 hours).

They were also made when TV was in its infancy, not nearly so much to watch, and for adults it was only on in the evenings! But this episode worked well, some very good acting (Stratford Johns in a small part, just before Z Cars!), and a plot where you could see the clues as the thing unfolded.

As an aside, I see that one of the minor players, a glamour girl in one of the rooms, was soon to be George Cole's wife. She did appear in a Minder, but I can't recall if that was actually as Mrs Arthur Daley (the famous "er indoors"), or something else not his missus?!

Maigret par excellence as a lodger in a house of weird goings-on

[clanciai · 8/10 · 20 March 2023]

Georges Simenon said himself about Rupert Davies as Maigret that he was the one who came closest to the real character. There were many episodes in this series, but they were all excellent, capturing the right Paris atmosphere and always doing the weirdest characters justice, and they would probably all be worth watching still today. Georges Simenon was one of the most qualified writer ever of detective stories, he worked himself as a police inspector in Paris, which activity replenished him with excellent stuff for the innumerable books he wrote, his detective Maigret actually sometimes transcending Sherlock Holmes in above all human psychology, which was not Conan Doyle's most prominent qualification. Maigret has the quality of getting inside people's minds, while Conan Doyle found a greater interest in practical details. Like all his books, all films of Maigret have been of major interest, and fortunately there is no end to them.

Maigret Takes a Room

[epigraph55 · 12 July 2022]

One of the few disappointments with the old BBC Maigrets is that Janvier never appears, just occasionally getting a mention as the person on the end of the phone getting instructions from Lucas. So in this story it has to be poor old Lapoint who gets shot instead. Davis renders a very Simenon-like version of Maigret here. No surprise there as we know the author thought him to be ideal for the part. (He's certainly a superb pipe-smoker!) Good rendition of a book that takes some dramatising.

The Cactus

[Prismark10 · 6/10 · 26 March 2022]

Lapointe is shot and seriously injured as he kept watch outside a boarding house.

Maigret has in his sights a young man who held up a club at gunpoint staying in the boarding house but he had a toy gun.

As Mrs Maigret is away. Maigret decides to check in as a guest so he can investigate more.

It is the apartment opposite that interests him more. An invalid woman stays there and a cactus plant keeps appearing and disappearing from the window.

There is a lot of subtle investigations done my Maigret. He also gets an old drunk out of work actor to provide a rouse by pretending to be Maigret.

He also has some sympathy for the eventual culprit. A bittersweet love affair for a man who has been on the run for a long time.