Category: French films

Les Diaboliques (1955)


Véra Clouzot and Simeone Signoret plot murder in twisty thriller Les Diaboliques

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Cast: Simeone Signoret (Nicole Horner), Véra Clouzot (Christina Delassalle), Paul Meurisse (Michel Delassalle), Charles Vanel (Alfred Fichet), Jean Brochard (Plantivaeu), Pierre Larquery (Drain), Michel Serrault (Raymond)

Clouzot is one of those fine directors, less prominent today in the list of the great artists of cinema. This might be because, unlike some of his contemporaries, many of his films were unashamed thrillers, Hitchcockian suspense tales, rather than the serious, artistic films we associate with French cinema. Les Diaboliques is the most popular of these films, a part mystery, part horror drama which slowly builds a confusingly terrifying picture of murder, danger and betrayal.

Christina (Véra Clouzot) is the wife of Paul (Michel Delassalle), a sadistic, bullying nightmare of a man. Together they run a boarding school, set up by her inheritance, but their marriage is a disaster. Paul is openly conducting an affair with fellow teacher Nicole (Simone Signoret). Nicole, however, is as disgusted and contemptuous of Paul as Christina – and she eventually persuades her that they should consider ridding themselves of Paul, with a temptingly simple scheme. However, things swiftly go against their plans…

Les Diaboliques is a compelling psychological thriller cum horror story, a creepy slow-burn of suggestion and paranoia that unfolds a bizarre whodunit mystery, which unnerves and constantly leaves you guessing. The story unfolds at a measured, inexorable pace. Clouzot’s camera is a quiet and carefully placed observer, taking in the events that occur in this hellishly cruel school with a calm directness, a cool minimalism that lets them speak for themselves.

And it’s a pretty hellish school. Paul is a brutal tyrant and bully, the teachers and students alternating between fear and loathing for him. He treats his fragile wife (struggling with a heart condition that could end her life at any moment) with a casual disregard and cruelty. Poor Christina is so put-upon and crushed, she seems wearily accepting of her husband’s constant affairs intermixed with cruelty. Even his mistress (an imperiously cold, harshly determined Simeone Signoret) can’t stand him. The whole school seems to have felt the effect of Paul’s personality – its run down, crushed, disheartened. The other teachers are either disinterested, faintly criminal or both. Is it any wonder wife and mistress want to murder him?

The murder, when it comes (and it’s the best part of half way through the movie) is almost blandly low-key. Clouzot even partly intercuts it with next-door neighbours complaining about the hot water being run late at night, the sound disturbing their radio quiz – unaware that it’s filling the bath so the two women can drown a drugged Paul. The flat where the crime occurs is as low-key and shabby as most of the rest of the film’s locations. 

Fascinatingly, what emerges increasingly are the lesbian undertones to the relationship between Nicole and Christina. Their intimacy is a major part of the build-up to the murder – their conspiratorial closeness seems as much as a careful seduction of Christina by Nicole as it is two like-minded souls coming together (this feeling, by the way, really comes into play as the film reach its conclusion). As events spiral out of control, Nicole becomes more and more of a protective, husbandly figure over the fragile Christina (an intriguing performance of vulnerability from Clouzot’s wife Véra), their physical and emotional closeness making them feel more and more like lovers dispatching a husband, rather than allies of convenience. It’s an intriguing subtext to the film, that I feel will make it of more and more interest as time goes on.

Events certainly do spiral out of control, as the body carefully placed in the swimming pool by the murderers (hoping to give the impression that Paul has accidentally drowned) is never discovered. Is it in the pool at all? Is Paul dead? Or has someone taken the body? A string of increasingly unnerving deliveries and visitations occurs – is Paul somehow speaking from the dead? Or are forces unknown manipulating the killers to disaster? Clouzot lets these events slowly build, avoiding the temptation to sprinkle clues or – more importantly – to give the audience more clues than the characters. We are only ever shown what Christine and Nicole see and only get the information they get.

This is where the film introduces its fourth primary character, retired detective Alfred Fichet. Fichet’s ambling, scruffy, seeming absent-mindedness makes him an eerily accurate forerunner of Colombo (at one point he all but says “just one more thing”). He rolls from place to place, clearly much sharper than he appears – it’s an impressively charismatic performance from Charles Vanel. He manages to work out what has happened (or perhaps what is happening) before the end – but moves too slowly in order to prevent disaster. But he changes the dynamic of the film in an intriguing way – shaking the film up 2/3rds of the way in, a tribute to the invention of its writing.

The final reveal of the plot is tinged with a horrifying terror – shot with an intense, watery fear that is guaranteed to haunt the memory. To say more is to reveal too much of an excellent act four twist. But it’s a sequence that you will find hard to shake from your mind – and one that you later realise the whole film was building towards. It’s what has led many people to call this film partly a horror story.

Clouzot’s film is a fine twisty thriller, even if at times it feels a little too in love with the mechanics of its tricks and plot mechanisms than it is with emotion and character. But it creates some intriguing and effective characters (including some small cameos) and it feels like a film that genuinely teaches us about the casual cruelty and selfishness that drives so many of our actions. There are many, many lies told in the film – even the children at the school casually lie – this is not a film that has a high opinion of the human race. 

Les Diaboliques has been called the greatest Hitchcock film Hitch never made. Hitch might well have brought a bit more flash and punch in its style (Clouzot is not the most inventive user of the camera here, with most shots very safe). But I’m not sure he could have improved its sense of creeping inevitability and grim claustrophobia. It still packs an inventive, clever and intriguing punch even today.

Leon (1994)


Jean Reno teaches Natalie Portman the ways of death in classic romantic thriller Leon

Director: Luc Besson

Cast: Jean Reno (Leon), Natalie Portman (Mathilda), Gary Oldman (Norman Stansfield), Danny Aiello (Tony), Michael Badalucco (Mathilda’s Father), Ellen Green (Mathilda’s Stepmother)

Luc Besson is an interesting film-maker, part visionary, part pulpy stylist. He has undeniable talent and visual flair, but far too often wastes this on trashy and juvenile comic book films, with a teenager’s preoccupations rather than a focus on story and character. One of the few exceptions to this is Leon, a film that marries his vibrancy with a heartfelt story.

Leon (Jean Reno) is a professional hitman working in New York, a dedicated professional with the stunted emotional maturity of a young teenager. One day the family of his next door neighbour is ruthlessly slaughtered by demented, drug-dealing cop Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman), leaving only precocious 12-year Mathilda (Natalie Portman) alive. Despite his concerns about involving himself in the world, Leon takes Mathilda in – and these two outcasts develop a deep emotional bond, part mentor-pupil, part father-daughter, part celibately romantic.

In many ways, Leon should be an uncomfortable viewing experience. It’s a film that explores the growing emotional and sexual awakening of two characters, one of whom is a 12 year old girl, the other a hitman in his 40s. In fact it’s hard to imagine it even being made today by a Hollywood studio (it was controversial enough at the time). However, it works because the characters are so skilfully established. The 12 year old is precociously mature emotionally and sexually for her age, the man is so emotionally stunted and childlike in his outlook on the world he effectively feels like a 14 year old. The sexual interest is all from the girl, and is constantly batted gently aside (with a confused lack of understanding) by an adult who doesn’t understand the adult world and its feelings. As such, the film manages to side-step the creep factor and turn itself into a sort of touching fable.

It further works because our two leads give such terrific performances. Jean Reno perfectly understands Leon’s childish appreciation of the world, his touching faith in other people (his father-figure Tony is clearly swindling him), his simple delight in things (his wide-eyed appreciation of Singin’ in the Rain is very endearing). He’s naïve and has a child’s lack of understanding of violence and its impact. He’s focused so tightly on his narrow world, he’s clearly never developed any real emotional understanding of the wider world. Reno creates a character who is a seasoned killer who feels like a under developed teenager – emotionally and sexually he’s pretty close to being a 12 year old himself. His interest in Mathilda is rooted more in an elder brother/sister relationship. You get the feeling sex has never even really entered his mental equation. It’s a masterful performance, effortlessly cool but also stirringly real, sweet, vulnerable.

Equally brilliant is Natalie Portman’s enthralling performance as Mathilda. She creates a character who is sexually daring, seemingly far more adult and savvy than Leon in many ways, but is still recognisably a vulnerable child. She’s spiky and defiant, but this hides a deep rooted sensitivity and a desperation for love and affection. Her continued expression of sexual interest in Leon is as much rooted in a desire to feel part of a genuine caring family unit as it is some desire to initiate sexual contact. Her performance is perfectly nuanced and searingly real. Portman also feels both simultaneously adult and childish, so she never feels as out of place.

The film also works because it feels like a slightly unworldly drama. The rules of this world seem slightly fairy-tale like. It happens in a dreamy New York, with shady gangster chiefs, corrupt cops and hitmen moving serenely from location to location, with seemingly no intrusion of “real” people into this equation. The world seems oddly off-kilter, a self-contained fantasy where Leon is some sort of gentle ogre and Mathilda an Alice in Wonderland. While it’s set in a real place, Besson’s film feels like a sort of violent bedtime story. It becomes harder for sex in this context to seem threatening.

Instead, despite the killing and slaughter, this is a sweet and even slightly sentimental love story, about two souls who have an inherent understanding of each other. It’s a deep bond that transcends their ages and social conventions. Besson really understands this, and it’s what motivates and powers the film. They switch roles between child and adult smoothly: So one moment Leon is almost fatherly, teaching the basics of sniper work to Mathilda, the next she teaches him to read. There are undertones of sexuality, but the feeling is that neither of these characters really understands the complexities and realities of sex, because one is too young and the other is too emotionally immature.

Besson’s film making around this is sublime. The film is stylish beyond belief, the camera and editing fluid and dynamic. Action scenes hum with tension and excitement. The violent confrontations (of which there are many) are brilliantly done. Besson draws extraordinary, heartfelt performances from the two leads and creates a wonderfully moving fantasy-tinged world. His invention and pulp style brings a unique feel to what is a heartfelt, rather tender story. It’s a perfect marriage of style and content, where both complement each other. The story feels heartfelt, the execution gives it a swaggering extra dimension.

The tender reality of Reno’s and Portman’s performances – and the marvellous gentleness which Besson films this with – allows other parts of the film to go fully over-the-top. This is not least the case with Gary Oldman’s ramped-up-to-eleven Stansfield, a Grade A nutter. Oldman leaves nothing in the dressing room here, completely letting rip. In a way a performance of such utterly demented excessiveness should be absurd. But with the other performances feeling so genuine, and Besson’s fairy-tale styling, means Oldman feels a perfect part of this world, the dark monstrous heart of a corrupted land. In any other context it wouldn’t work, but here it really does.

Leon is a very tender, exciting and emotionally moving film – a great example of stylish film making married to a genuinely moving storyline between two people who feel like realistic, three dimensional characters. Both the style and the heart of the story complement each other perfectly. It’s a terrific piece of film making, with three performances at the heart each on their own way a stand-out. It must surely be Luc Besson’s finest ever film – and a height he’s very rarely ever reached again.

The Day of the Jackal (1973)


Edward Fox takes aim as suave assassin The Jackal

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Cast: Edward Fox (The Jackal), Michel Lonsdale (Deputy Commissioner Claude Lebel), Terence Alexander (Lloyd), Michael Auclair (Colonel Rolland), Alan Badel (The Minister), Tony Britton (Inspector Thomas), Denis Carey (Casson), Cyril Cusack (Gunsmith), Maurice Denham (General Colbert), Olga Georges-Picot (Denise), Barrie Ingham (St. Clair), Derek Jacobi (Caron), Jean Martin (Wolenski), Ronald Pickup (Forger), Anton Rodgers (Bernard), Delphine Seyrig (Colette de Montpellier), Donald Sinden (Mallinson), Timothy West (Commissioner Berthier)

The definition of lazy criticism is to say a story doesn’t work because we know the outcome. If that was the case, no production of Hamlet would ever work, and no adaptation of a best-selling book would ever find favour with an audience. We’d be bored by films based on history and we’d be even more indifferent to the hundreds of films made every year that follow accepted narrative structures. What makes a film compelling is often not the destination, but the journey. How do we get there? What do we learn? How does it make us feel? All of these things are keenly observed throughout Fred Zinnemann’s masterful adaptation of The Day of the Jackal.

The year is 1962 and the French President Charles de Gaulle is blamed by many for weakening France by granting independence to Algeria. The Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) hire an English professional assassin known only as The Jackal (Edward Fox) to assassinate De Gaulle. When word of the target leaks to the panicked French Government, Commissioner Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale) is given an impossible task – identify a man of whom the government knows nothing and stop him from carrying out a plan only he knows the details of. Meanwhile, the Jackal relentlessly goes about his meticulous planning.

So anyone with passing familiarity with history will know that de Gaulle was not assassinated in the early 60s. Watching The Day of the Jackal, you know that the Jackal will fail. But that’s not the point of the film. Instead it’s a masterful, streamlined thriller that completely understands how much we can invest in watching someone go about a job with calm, cool professionalism. It’s the ingenuity and meticulousness that makes the film compelling, the way each angle of the Jackal’s plan is carefully considered and information slowly delivered to the audience. In some areas we are a couple of steps ahead of Lebel’s search. In others we are as far behind as he is: we may know the weapon and the Jackal’s secret identities, but we know as little about his final plan as Lebel does – it’s only when it’s revealed that all the pieces we’ve seen make perfect sense.

It’s a film that has been assembled with all the grace and skill of a master clockmaker. Zinnemann’s direction and Kenneth Ross’ taut screenplay make every second count. There isn’t a single piece of flab on the bones of this movie, every scene carries a piece of vital information that contributes to the overall picture. Zinnemann sprinkles the film with careful passing shots of calendars and clocks, making the sense of a countdown towards the Jackal’s strike hang intimidatingly over the whole film. The film is gripping, right from its opening reconstruction of the almost-successful OAS assassination attempt on De Gaulle in 1962. Everything feels perfectly interlinked and connected, each scene brilliantly builds on top of the ones before.

This is quite simply an unshakeably brilliant engine of a film, a relentless ride with tension and excitement dripping from every frame. It’s not afraid to be cruel or dangerous – and some of the victims are truly blameless – and it’s not afraid to show that violence and cruelty are weapons as much for the authorities as the Jackal (the cruellest act, after all, is committed by the French Army on poor loyal Wawlinski).

A large part of the success of the film rests on Edward Fox’s performance in the lead. Fox gives the Jackal an unshakeable, public-school, confidence, an attractive resolve that sees him meet every obstacle with a cool elán, resolutely unperplexed by anything that he encounters. Fox’s superb performance succeeds in making you engage with (and even root for) a man who is a cold-blooded professional killer, who commits murder (when provoked) without hesitation. How does this happen? Again it’s his efficiency, his expertise. The film totally understands how engrossing watching talented people go about their work can be.

The film makes the minutia of setting up an operation immensely compelling. In careful detail, we see exactly how the Jackal goes about getting a false passport from the authorities. How he scopes out a potential place to conduct the assassination. His careful preparation of disguises and fake identities. In one gloriously done scene, we see him practise using his specially constructed rifle on a melon at a huge range. Carefully he takes a series of shots at the melon, adjusting the sight each time to make the weapon as accurate as possible. The scene is a showcase for the Jackal’s meticulous professionalism (you can see why the producers were outraged when the scene was cut from a TV screening in the 1980s – it’s practically a highlight of the movie).

Similar investment, however, is made in the detailed footwork involved in tracing and detecting the Jackal by the French and English police. Michael Lonsdale is a perfect foil for Fox’s urbane cool, with his dour, grey, crumpled Label, a man selected somewhat unwillingly for a mission but who slowly reveals the cool head and nerves of steel that made him perfect for the job. The police-work used to try and close the net on the Jackal is as intricate as the hitman’s own work – careful plodding through files and methodical calculation and educated guesswork. It’s as far from the rush and tumble of Hollywood as you can imagine – but somehow, because it feels so real, every discovery against the odds by the authorities becomes hard-won and exciting. The sense of a net being skilfully built also serves to make the Jackal’s skilful evasion of each trap all the more compelling.

And the tense race against time lasts for the whole of the film. The film brilliantly keeps this cat-and-mouse game alive, with the police and the Jackal constantly leap-frogging each other to stay one step ahead. Each move and counter-move has all the intricacy of a chess game. There are enough twists and turns to keep every audience member gripped. The eventual assassination attempt itself is built up to beautifully – a wordless, tense but brilliantly assembled montage of liberation day celebrations keeps both the police and the audience on their toes as to where the Jackal will strike from. The finale of the film turns on a twist of fate that is simply a brilliant coup de theatre. There is even a droll little coda that deepens the mystery of the Jackal even further.

Zinnemann’s direction throughout is flawless – calm, measured and methodical, and never allowing flash or bombast to drown out events. It’s helped as well by the wonderful cast of actors – a real who’s-who of British and French character actor talent, with Alan Badel’s smooth Interior Minister, Eric Porter’s cool but fanatic OAS leader, Cyril Cusack’s quiet gunsmith and Derek Jacobi’s eager young detective particular standouts. I also have a lot of time for Olga Georges-Picot’s quietly moving performance of a woman pushed to extreme actions by grief.

The Day of the Jackal is another of those near perfect movies. Everything it sets out to do it does perfectly, and it rewards constant viewing. It’s got some terrific unflashy performances and is a perfect demonstration of why professionalism and expertise can be so engrossing. It wraps this up into a deliciously tense confection, where every scene bubbles with undercurrents of drama and danger. There is not an off-beat – instead it’s a brilliant piece of pulp cinema that transcends itself into being something truly adept and dramatic. You can’t take your eyes off it for a second. I don’t hesitate for a second in saying it’s one my favourite thrillers.

Rust and Bone (2012)


Matthias Schoenaerts and Marion Cotillard in an unusual romantic drama

Director: Jacques Audiad

Cast: Marion Cotillard (Stéph), Matthias Schoenaerts (Ali), Armand Verdure (Sam), Corinne Masiero (Anna), Céline Sallette (Louise), Bouli Lanners (Martial)

Audiad’s films combine cinematic artistry with profound, sometimes elliptical, character studies that provoke great work from talented actors. Rust and Bone is no exception.

It’s the plot of a melodrama, staged like social-realism. Written down it sounds like the purest Hollywood schlock: crippled killer whale trainer Stéph (Cotillard) enters into a friendship that grows deeper with would-be kickboxer Ali (Schoenarts), who has a troubled relationship with his 5-year-old son. But the realistic portrayal of the pain of losing your limbs (in a scene of raw intensity from Cotillard) and Ali’s troubled homelife, penchant for casual sex and occasional resorting to violence when frustrated, pegs the film style farcloser to a hard-edged Bicycle Thieves. The film also has a lyrical poetry about it, as their relationship gently develops from friends with benefits to genuine feeling, which stops it from feeling gritty or hard-edged.

The film’s main strength is the brilliance of its two leads. Cotillard is outstanding as a passionate free-spirit whose entire world ends overnight. Her expressive face carries a host of confused feelings which shift and reform across her like a human kaleidoscope. Stéph’s vulnerability is married with a great strength of character, but Cotillard avoids many of the clichés of movie paraplegics by making her a woman who adapts without anger to her new condition. Instead, after overcoming depression, Stéph is looking actively (and with a curiosity) for something new to fill her life with.

Cotillard is so wonderful in the role, it’s very easy to overlook Schoenaerts’ skilful underplaying and Brandoish physical mastery. Ali is, I’ve got to be honest, a hard character to like – selfish, childish, in many ways thoughtless, blunt and fixated on himself. He’s also a terrible dad. Not malicious or cruel, just easily bored and frustrated with his kid. This frustration appears with anyone who doesn’t react the way he wants – “You’re so annoying!” he whines at both Stéph and Sam. Despite this, Schoenaerts’ is the heart of the movie. The film is his story, and he makes a difficult character engaging enough to carry the audience with him.

Rust and Bone is a film constructed around brilliant scenes and striking moments. In a wonderful sequence, Stéph repeats the arm signals she used to train the whales: at first she seems sad, then a warmth of enjoyment crosses her face. It’s the prompt for her to revisit the zoo, but the visit seems bittersweet: we see hugs with her friends, but Audiad cuts out the dialogue, adding to Cotillard’s own confused feelings about her return. Later she visits the whale that crippled her. Her mood here (with the camera to her back) is hard to read – is she forgiving the whale? Is she saying goodbye to this part of her life? Moments like this work so well because of the brilliance and humanity of the performances of both leads and Audiad’s patience and control as a filmmaker.

Audiad packs this beautiful film with moments like this. I particularly liked the bookend images he uses for each act. Each sets up the act thematically, from a bloodied tooth spinning on a pavement to the cover of a transit van flapping in motion. Audiad bathes the film in a series of cool blue colours, interspersed with flashes of light at moments of suggested revelation. He also has the discipline not to belabour the points of scenes or hammer home the feelings of characters (sometimes leaving you wanting more definition for the emotions they experience).

For a film immersed (to a certain degree) in a social realist world, there are odd gaps in logic: after throwing Ali out of her home (at gun point!) over his serial disregard for Sam, his indirect responsibility for her losing her job and his stroppy temper, would Anna really happily allow Sam to visit him a few months later? The disappearance of Stéph for much of the final reel of the film also pulls the focus from the central relationship and makes the final ending both rather sudden and slightly pat, out of step with the rest of the movie.

Audiad does bring a degree of engaging ambiguity to the story. The relationship between Ali and Stéph is intriguingly hard to define. She seems drawn to him for his lack of guile and his treatment of her disability with a matter-of-factness free of pity or embarrassment (qualities that linger around many of her other interactions). However, shifts in her character over the course of the film are deliberately kept low-key and open-ended, allowing moments where she surprises herself and the audience with the strength of her feeling. Similarly, the lack of depth in Ali’s personality makes his emotional development halting and discordant – he is attracted to her physically, but which qualities in her cause those feelings to deepen? It’s not immediately clear watching it – and I suspect many viewers would have different opinions from watching this curiously inscrutable film.

It’s a thoughtful film, but somehow never quite as moving as you expect. I think a lot of your connection with it depends on how much you feel Ali deserves redemption, or if you can forgive the constant stream of selfish and thoughtless things he does. I’m not quite sure I did. Similarly Stéph remains, for all the expressive humanity Cotillard brings to her, strangely unknowable.

That’s partly the problem with the film. Despite its beauty, it’s a little too enigmatic to be completely engaging. Wonderfully shot, and strangely haunting as it is, I think this is one every viewer will have a personal reaction to. I can imagine many would be deeply moved by its blue-tinted mystery and fragile dissection of damaged souls. For me it didn’t quite have the impact I think the film needs, and I didn’t feel this love story quite coalesced into a something truly profound in itself. It’s a beautifully made and intelligent film but not one I fell in love with – though I can imagine many people have.

Rififi (1955)


Master thieves at work!

Director: Jules Dassin

Cast: Jean Servais (Tony “le Stéphanois”), Carl Möhner (Jo “le Suédois”), Robert Manuel (Mario Ferrati), Jules Dassin (César “le Milanais”), Magali Noël (Viviane), Claude Sylvain (Ida), Marcel Lupovici (Pierre Grutter), Robert Hossein (Rémy Grutter), Pierre Grasset (Louis Grutter), Marie Sabouret (Mado), Janine Darcey (Louise)

After you’ve spent some time watching some pretty duff films, finally sitting down and watching a masterpiece of any genre is a complete relief. That’s pretty much what this film is. Which is particularly interesting when you learn the film is based on a book that Dassin (it’s director) described as one of the worst books that he had ever read. He took the job only because (with his blacklisting in Hollywood) he was worried he would never work again, and only on condition that he could completely restructure the original script.

Newly released from prison, Tony (Jean Servais) is approached to take part in a smash-and-grab raid on a jewellery store by his old criminal contacts. He rejects the idea, but after discovering his former lover has left him for a gangster rival in his absence he changes his mind, on condition that the smash-and-grab plan is replaced by a complex operation that will clear out the shop’s safe containing over 250 million Francs’ worth of jewels. But in the criminal underworld, they discover there are always bigger fish circling to take their cut by any means they can.

I watched this film three days ago, and its effect was so lasting I feel almost as if I have watched it several times in my mind’s eye since then. Jules Dassin, an under-rated director, has a mastery of visual language and tense narrative that burns nearly every single scene into your retina. Rififi is a technically assured, dazzling piece of cinema that gives heft and weight to a simple story, and also has something interesting to say about human nature and the codes that dictate the lives of thieves.

Any discussion of the film probably needs to start with its highlight: a 28 minute sequence detailing the robbery itself, told in near silence and shot with forensic detail. In fact, so intelligently thought-through was this scene that in many countries it earned the film a ban, as it was feared it was too much of a “how-to” guide for thieves. The scene is a unique creation of Dassin’s – the comparative scene in the book is no more than 2-3 pages. Here it’s a quarter of the movie.

The scene is blisteringly tense, and the decision to keep the action silent means every single noise (a piano key, the whirr of a drill, the bang of a hammer) carries huge tension. There is, as many reviewers have noted, no particular reason for the thieves to keep to strict silence – but it’s dynamite cinema. Dassin combines this tension with a delighted observance of the ingenuity of these criminals. Everyday items are brilliantly repurposed to perform specific tasks (I particularly enjoyed the use of an umbrella as a vital tool). Dassin celebrates the effectiveness and skill of these burglars, and their technique and skill is infectiously entertaining.

Dassin probably invented the genre of the heist movie here – and he encourages us to feel a delight in the accomplishment and ambition of the heist. But he also reminds us that these are criminals: weapons are banned as they will guarantee a long prison stretch; the couple whose house they invade are ruthlessly chloroformed and tied up; a policeman is bludgeoned as part of the get-away. In the third act of the film we see that Tony in particular is no shrinking violet when it comes to violence.

The build-up to the heist establishes each of the characters clearly, along with the flaws that will revisit them later: Tony makes enemies too easily, Jo’s loyalty affects his judgement, Mario is too happy-go-lucky, César has a weakness for women. A number of sequences show us the gang’s preparations – from hours of surveillance, to an amusing sequence where they experiment with methods to beat the store’s top-of-the-line alarm before a moment of inspiration hits them.

The third act of the film however takes us into a dark exploration of the loyalties and codes of honour that govern the criminal underworld. Tony’s enemies try to muscle in on the proceeds, leading to a series of increasingly violent episodes, as move and counter move is made to secure control of the funds. Here Dassin again pulls no punches – we have swearing, we have murder, we have a strung-out junkie kidnapping a child in return for a free hit – and it’s brilliantly put together.

It also tells us something. Tony has a code – and whether we agree with it or not, he’s faithful to it. Dassin himself plays the man whose fondness for a vain singer will leak out the plot details (it’s a lovely performance – and the man who was blacklisted must have had some delight here in playing a grass) and the confrontation scene with Tony is great: “I really liked you” Tony states sadly and regretfully: that doesn’t change his mind. Tony’s rival Grutter lacks even Tony’s sense of fairplay and his ruthlessness puts the other gangsters into perspective and questions Tony’s ideas of a code of honour among thieves: Grutter is a success precisely because he doesn’t give a toss about that sort of thing.

If the film has a flaw, it’s in its treatment of the female characters. Although Dassin arguably suggests that in this mileu many of them are just powerless passengers swept along by the actions of their men, they still seem less than fully formed characters, defined by simple character traits (Louise is a mother, Viviane is shallow, Ida is a flirt). The one dull section of the film follows Viviane singing in a nightclub – a scene introduced solely to drop the title and explain its meaning.

The film is also, at best, neutral in what it expects us to make of Tony brief whipping (off-screen) his ex-girlfriend Mado with a belt, after she betrays him with the gangster Grutter. Particularly as Mado seems to believe herself at fault rather than Tony. The scene is more about Tony – it’s his feeling of powerlessness that the camera focuses on – and Mado seems to shrug off the three blows she receives as just the price of living. Ah well, that’s the fifties for you I guess. And it’s not as if Tony – a moody man perfectly capable of cold blooded killing later – is a saint in any case. We also have the balance of Jo and Mario’s loving regard for their wives – and César’s misguided affection for Viviane.

And of course Tony our “hero” is certainly an anti-hero. In his first scene he’s stroppily demanding “in” on a poker game he doesn’t have the funds for. He’s demanding and surly with everyone except his godson. He is ruthless when he needs to be. Jean Servais’ crumpled, baggy face and dead-eyed stare genuinely make him look like a man who has spent five years inside. His adherence to his moral code is so rigid no level of regret will stop him punishing those whom he deems have deserved death. Dassin also undercuts his potential tragic greatness, as trivial events – a missed phone call principally – lead him to destruction. 

The film’s final sequence is inspired, and again wordless. A dying man races a car through the city to return a child to his mother. Is it devotion to the child? Does he want to get the money back to the only family he has? Has he accepted death? Is he racing for a chance of living? Around him the camera whirls, the editing is frantic and the child cavorts in the car oblivious of the danger. It’s a sequence that is both moving and strangely profound. It’s the final masterstroke in a film full of them.