The 1947 Quai des Orfèvres is one of the neglected pleasures of the underrated era of French film between the Occupation and the French New Wave explosion — the period that the New Wave directors referred to, slightingly, as the cinéma de papa. Henri-Georges Clouzot, who made it, had been denounced as a collaborator: his 1943 Le corbeau was so unflattering a portrait of French provincial life that it was said to have been used by the Nazis as anti-French propaganda. Quai des Orfèvres restored him to favor, and he became perhaps the most important filmmaker in France until the end of the 1950s.

The film is a policier — the title identifies the location of the precinct in the Ménilmontant neighborhood of Paris — but one with unusual charm and emotional range. The heroine is Jenny Lamour (Suzy Delair), a cabaret singer who foolishly allows an amorous hunchback with a thick pocketbook named Georges Brignon (Charles Dullin) to flirt with her so she can get him to finance her entrée into the movies. This behavior arouses the jealousy of her accompanist husband, Maurice Martineau (Bernard Blier). Discovering evidence of a rendezvous at Brignon’s home, he sneaks out there, armed, after first establishing an alibi for himself at the Eden, a music hall where he and Jenny sometimes perform. But he arrives to find the man already dead. Jenny says she killed him accidentally when he came on to her — though it’s not Maurice she confesses to but their friend Dora (Simone Renant), a photographer whose adoration of Jenny prompts her to cover her friend’s tracks (and conceal the confession from Maurice).

There was a brief period in Hollywood’s history, around World War II, when melodramas and jazz musicals were combined, and those hybrids (like Anatole Litvak’s 1941 Blues in the Night) are the closest American equivalents to Quai des Orfèvres, with its entertaining revue and nightclub numbers. The comparison doesn’t do Clouzot’s movie justice, though. The filmmaking here is superlative (with glittering, noirish photography by Armand Thirard), the writing is tart, and the performances are both witty and soulful. Bernard Blier, the great character actor whose son Bertrand became one of the signal directors of the post–New Wave years, supplies a touching portrait of the kind of devotion that can, under the worst circumstances, drive a man to desperation. His Maurice and Suzy Delair’s Jenny, eternally squabbling yet profoundly reliant on each other, are one of the most convincing married couples movies have given us. Delair’s broad, radiant face is beautiful even when it’s turned down in a pout, and she’s naturally sensuous, whether shaking a beribboned bustle at the crowd at the Eden or singing a ballad at her classier venue, a club where three Gypsy violinists encircle her like chorus boys around a diva.

Top billing, however, goes not to Delair but to Louis Jouvet, who plays Antoine, the inspector on the homicide case. Jouvet, with his lanky frame and winecellar voice and a face that looks as if someone had pulled it like taffy, was one of the chief reasons to go to French movies in the ’30s and ’40s; if you’ve seen him as the down-and-out baron in Jean Renoir’s The Lower Depths, you know why. His acting here is so unstressed that he scarcely seems to be doing anything more than insinuating himself, but his performance is decorated with grace notes, like the way he kisses his sleeping son and the loping limp he develops to acknowledge an unhealed bullet wound. Jouvet manages to make this character warm-hearted without sentimentalizing him — especially in the final scenes, when he pays tribute to the love that the three suspects feel for one another other. His final scene with Simone Renant has a wised-up tenderness you don’t expect.

The movie is full of such surprises, like a scene where loyal cabbie Émile (beautifully played by Pierre Larquey), after Antoine has trapped him into identifying a fare, apologizes to her for getting her in trouble. Or a torch song delivered by a dark-eyed chanteuse with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. Or the way Clouzot stages an encounter between Maurice and a prostitute in adjacent jail cells. And in a shiny new print, it’s not to be missed.