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Touchez Pas au Grisbi
" Growing older is a balancing act between skills that have never been
better, and abilities that sometimes betray. At 50, Max the Liar has
never possessed more wisdom about his profession of burglary. But he
no longer cares to make the effort, and his dream is to salt away 96
kilos in gold bars that have been stolen at Orly Airport. Then he will
retire. Max is a solid, well-groomed, impeccably dressed, flawlessly
polite man whose code is so deeply embedded that he never refers to
it, even indirectly. During the course of three days, he uses all of
his wisdom and experience to make his dream come true, and it is almost
enough.
Max is played by Jean Gabin, named "the actor of the
century" in
a French poll, in Jacques Becker's Touchez Pas au Grisbi,
a 1954 French crime film that uncannily points the way toward Jean-Pierre
Melville's great "Bob Le Flambeur" the following year. The
two films follow similar story arcs and have similar heroes: middle-age
men, well-liked, able to figure the odds, familiar in their haunts
of clubs and restaurants, vulnerable only because of the passions of
their hotheaded pals. Gabin plays a man of few words, who displays
warmth that is real but understated; a man who is always thinking a
step ahead, using brainwork instead of footwork or gunplay to survive
in the underworld."
"The world of French crime films is a particular place, informed by
the French love for Hollywood film noir, a genre they identified and
named. But the great French noirs of the 1950s are not copies of Hollywood;
instead, they have a particularly French flavor; in "Touchez Pas
au Grisbi," the critic Terence Rafferty writes, "real men
eat pate," and this is "among the very few French movies
about the criminal class in which neither the characters nor the filmmakers
are afflicted by the delusion that they are Americans." A few
years later, in Godard's "Breathless" (1960), Belmondo would
be deliberately channeling Bogart, but here Gabin is channeling only
himself. He is the original, so there is no need to look for inspiration."
[The film also stars a young Jeanne Moreau]------ Roger Ebert
DVD - The Criterion Collection
- Available subtitles: English
- Available Audio Tracks: French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
- Video interviews with actors Lino Ventura and Daniel Cauchy and
composer Jean Wiener
- Original theatrical trailer
- New essays by critics Geoffrey O'Brien and Philip Kemp
Curator's Comments:
Read
Roger Ebert's essay on this DVD Classic.
Director: Jacques Becker
Black & White
96 minutes
Released: 1954
Rated: NR
Country: France/Italy
Language: French
Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
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