Maigret (TV Series) Peter the Lett (1963) User Reviews

Maigret has double trouble

[Tony-Holmes · 8/10 · 25 December 2022]

Saw this on Talking Pictures channel (UK - old films and TV) who are running all 4 of the original Maigret series (BBC, early 60s). This is series 4, and the overall quality has gradually improved (looking back with hindsight -- it was quite a cult series at the time!).

I see that Sir-Fitzy-Obbolongs has penned another curious review, yet again paying no attention to the undoubted budget & production limitations at the time, not the issues in squashing some of the Simenon stories into the hour running time of this series (the subsequent Gambon & Atkinson stories were much longer).

This story had a couple of interesting twists, one being that for TV purposes, this story was next to last, so Torrance's sad demise (as mentioned in the Epigraph review) wouldn't be a problem for all the previous episodes he'd been in.

I'm not a fan of even TV heroes getting shot, and carrying on as if they'd just pulled a muscle, so the last few minutes of this one didn't ring true, even if our hero was determined to get his man (actually, men).

Simenon's error corrected.

[epigraph55 · 7/10 · 17 August 2022]

Peter the Lett was Simenon's first Maigret book. Presumably he hadn't intended to write a series originally because he killed off Torrance in that book. Torrance's reappearance in subsequent books is never explained. Putting this dramatisation as the penultimate episode removes that anomaly. Clever! Also clever is the way it explains Maigret's time off in the next episode.

Interesting story could have been better handled

[Sir_Oblong_Fitzoblong · 7/10 · 25 February 2022]

Benefits from the location budget of the later series with lots of street scenes to pad out the story but yet again totally fails to make the high-life feel convincingly high.

In an infuriatingly perverse piece of adaptation for a series that could have avoided many of its faults by sometimes departing more than it did from Simenon's story details, it chooses this penultimate episode to make crude and damaging melodramatic changes when the original version of events would have been far more satisfyingly dramatic and plausible.

Peter the Lett

[Prismark10 · 6/10 · 1 April 2023]

Peter the Lett (Marius Goring) a renowned international fraudster has arrived in Paris. Maigret is at the station to pick him but decides instead to follow him.

At a hotel, Peter has a rendezvous with Greek financier Nikos Strophades. There he introduces himself as Oppenheim.

Maigret is notified that the train in which Peter the Lett arrived in contains a dead body. The deceased looks so much like Peter the Lett.

Meanwhile this Oppenheim person seems ever so evasive. While investigating him Maigret gets shot. Torrance ends up getting killed in a masterly way.

This was the first Maigret novel by Simenon. Torrance death makes more sense in the series as this is the penultimate story. In the book, Torrance dies but reappears in subsequent novels.

Maybe Maigret should had just arrested Peter the Lett at the train station, rather than let him go loose. Also given that Maigret was in great pain after being shot, he really should had gone to hospital and be off duty due to illness. It just looked silly to see him persevering on.

Maigret single-handedly going after Peter/Oppenheim who kept giving him the slip verged on carelessness. Were no other policemen around to accompany Maigret?