Movie Details
| Title: | Classe Tous Risques | |
| Director: | Claude Sautet | |
| Year: | 1960 | |
| Genre: | Crime | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 08.15.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 08.15.06 | Paramount | French crime night at the Paramount... They call it noir and I guess it is but I choose to define that term more specifically as american films so all the foreign counterparts are just crime movies to me. As crime movies go, though... this one is pretty good. I was particularly impressed with this very French sort of spiritual bent that the film takes on toward the end. The very end probably cuts off too abruptly for some but I saw it as a sign of what was really important with the conclusion to Lino Ventura's character. Pretty cool I thought. anyway, Ventura and this other dude make a daring daylight robbery and, in their getaway from Milan to Minsk... err... Milan to Nice, both his partner and his wife get gunned down by police. That leaves him to take care of his two young sons and find some sort of sanctuary in France although he's a severely wanted and hunted man. He contacts a group of his friends in Paris, each of whom owe him a great debt, but they're either on parole or have grown too fat and respectable to risk their necks out for their long-forgotten old buddy who's now lamming it and driving the cops crazy, so they hire a stranger (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to drive down and pick him up in disguise as an ambulance transporting a head injury. Ventura plays this character really well. When he gets back to Paris and talks to his "friends" you really get the full implication that this guy would've gone anywhere for his friends, and is equal parts sad and angry that his buddies didn't do likewise. It's only Belmondo, a friend of Ventura's recently-clipped partner, that treats him with the proper respect. It's kind of an unconventional storyline for a crime movie - an older guy trying to secure somewhere safe for his kids to grow up - but it's pretty cool in that it examines not the flashy robberies and heists but what happens to men that make that their living. Pretty cool stuff. |
