CLASSE TOUS RISQUE (The Big Risk) B+
France Italy (110 mi)
1960 d: Claude Sautet
To love American
cinema is fine; to try to make French films as if they were American is
something else again, very much open to argument. I am not going to attack anybody for it,
having myself fallen into that trap two or three times. Jean Renoir learned a lesson from Stroheim
and Chaplin when he was making Nana and Tire au flanc, that is to say, he
reinforced the French side of his films while he absorbed the Hollywood
masters. In the same way, Claude Sautet
understood, after the unavoidable detour through crime films, that he should,
in Jean Cocteau’s words, be a bird who sings in his own genealogical tree.
—Francois Truffaut, from his memoir The Films in My Life, 1975
Along with Truffaut, Claude Sautet must be considered heirs
to the humanist traditions of Jean Renoir, known for making sensitive movies
about the French middle class, offering sincere portraits of doctors, lawyers,
businessmen, or architects, all reevaluating their place in a postwar society,
becoming more prominently purposeful and significant in French life. Popular audiences loved his bourgeois take on
modern relationships, particularly his self-critical rendering of a modern
world, much like Woody Allen’s films are viewed today, beautifully expressed by
an intriguing pairing of Yves Montand and Romy Schneider, probably Sautet’s
favorite actors, or Schneider with Michel Piccoli. A graduate of the highly influential
Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies, currently known as La Fémis,
early on Sautet worked in sculpture, then painting film sets, even writing
music reviews before finding work as an assistant or second unit director,
developing a reputation as a script doctor, where Truffaut, among others,
valued his ability to bring to life relatively mediocre scripts, largely through
his editing talent of cinematic montage, suggesting he was an excellent
technician. Unlike other fiercely
political directors of his era, such as those that ushered in the French New
Wave, Sautet never pretended to fight for political or social change, content
to evaluate couples in the midst of a midlife crisis, exploring relationships
between men and women over forty, typically scrutinizing all aspects of
existence, love, work, friendships, ambition, and disillusionment. But before he developed this go-to artistic
sensibility, he took a swing at French gangster classicism, producing an
expertly staged debut feature that deserves to be considered alongside other
fatalistic film noir efforts like Jacques Becker’s TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI
(1954), which incidentally was actor Lino Ventura’s first film, Jules Dassin’s
RIFIFI (1955), and Jean-Pierre Melville’s BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956), where the
film so impressed Melville that he basically took the baton in his own
single-minded pursuit of resurrecting the French gangster genre. Of interest is the scriptwriter, José
Giovanni, a pseudonym for Joseph Damiani, a Corsican Nazi sympathizer who
collaborated with the Nazi’s during the Vichy Occupation, whose father was a
professional gambler who owned a hotel in the French Alps, sentenced to a year
in prison for running an illegal gambling casino. Damiani was a member of a Nazi Youth Group,
eventually joining his brother in the criminal underground, extorting money
from Jews during the Occupation, while after the war they posed as French
Intelligence Officers, targeting a series of rich merchants, torturing them
into confessing where they hid their money before murdering them. Eventually he was captured and sentenced to
death, but his sentence was commuted to twenty years of hard labor, eventually
released by none other than French President René Coty after serving eleven and
a half years. Interestingly, Damiani
became “the” French screenwriter for crime films in the 50’s and 60’s, proudly
writing from his own personal experiences, which included 21 novels, 33 film
scripts, and even directed 15 of his own movies. His first novel under the pseudonym of José
Giovanni was Le Trou (1957), about
his own attempts at a 1947 prison break, immediately turned into a 1960 film by
Jacques Becker, and the rest is history.
While his real identity was eventually revealed, Damiani was age 70 at
the time and allowed to live in peaceful obscurity in Switzerland, not far from
the site of his father’s hotel.
Certainly one reason few have seen or even heard of this
film is the timing of its release, coming just one week after the release of
Godard’s BREATHLESS (1960), which simply dominated the headlines, along with a
rush of stories about the French New Wave (which all but ignores Sautet), where
in France, at least, Godard has been treated as a demi-god ever since, while
Sautet has been relegated to the dustbins of history, resurrected by the
monumental achievement of Bertrand Tavernier’s Journey
Through French Cinema (Voyage à travers le cinéma français) (2016),
supposedly part of a larger twelve-hour effort to re-examine French cinema,
including relative unknowns like Sautet who are seen right alongside
established greats. What’s immediately
noticeable is the bleak, no-nonsense, matter-of-fact style used by Sautet,
expressing a gritty, near-documentary realism, very much in the cinéma vérité
New Wave manner, captured in Black and White photography by Ghislain Cloquet,
who also shot the Resnais Auschwitz documentary NIGHT AND FOG (1956) as well as
LE TROU (1960), where there is brilliant use of actual street locations
throughout (Milan, Nice, and Paris), becoming something of a road movie for
much of the film. This is a movie that
elevates what was a second tier actor Lino Ventura into a starring role, an
Italian actor who was a former wrestler known as “The Gorilla” who became a
beloved figure in France, the centerpiece of Melville’s somber homage to the
French Resistance in Army
of Shadows (L’Armée des ombres) (1969), where who can forget a long
tracking shot of Ventura running down the street? (L'armée
des Ombres YouTube 1:38). The film
opens where Ventura, as Abel Davos, is a gangster on the run avoiding a death
sentence, who after a decade of living in Italy, even starting a family, is
running out of money, so he decides to move with his wife Thérèse (Simone
France) and their two young sons back to France, but not before he pulls one
last heist with his partner in crime, Raymond Naldi (Stan Krol), a daring theft
taking place on the crowded streets of Milan, intersecting a courier carrying a
money pouch, a meticulous act of Bressonian precision that depends upon the
element of surprise, each escaping in separate directions, eventually meeting
up afterwards in what has to be considered a success, though their take is
considerably less than anticipated.
Their plans to make their way across the border runs into unanticipated
difficulties, eventually stealing a boat, landing on an empty beach at Meston
in the south of France, where they are surprised by two well-armed customs
men. In an ensuing shootout on the
beach, both guards are killed, but Raymond and Thérèse are also shot dead,
occurring right in front of the trembling eyes of his own children, where
immediately he’s back on the run again, this time lugging his two kids around
with him, recalling an early Marlene Dietrich film, BLONDE VENUS (1932), where
she goes on the lam with a kid in tow.
As presented, it defies one’s beliefs, as what kid could seemingly get
over it so quickly and retain their composure instead of being reduced to a
quivering mess? But here, Davos instructs
them to always walk ten feet behind him as he stealthily moves through city
streets, taking a bus to Nice. The film
also leaves out several interesting details from the book, as Davos is actually
modelled after a criminal Gestapo hitman named Abel “The Mammoth” Danos, a
character Joseph Damiani came in contact with while serving time in Santé
Prison, not long after the Liberation.
The real-life Danos was executed by firing squad in 1952 for treason. But rather than reveal his despicable past,
the film turns Davos into a sympathetic figure.
Perhaps even more remarkable, one of Danos’s criminal associates was the
infamous Pierre Loutrel, aka Pierrot le Fou, the name attached to a Jean-Paul
Belmondo character in a later Godard film, Pierrot
le Fou (1965). As a result, one
line that’s sure to get a snicker out of the audience is when Davos is
identified by the cops as “an old pal of Pierrot le Fou.”
The focus of the film changes when Davos contacts his old
pals in Paris, starting with Riton (Michel Ardan), expecting a kind of honor
amongst thieves, where he expected returned favors for getting many of them out
of tight jams in the past, where they might well be in prison were it not for
his actions. What we witness instead is
a lot of excuses and procrastination, as this once mighty criminal boss has all
but been forgotten, as people have moved on without him. His unexpected return sends them all into a
panic, each not knowing what the other will do.
Finding it too risky to head to Nice themselves, they send a total
stranger driving an ambulance, an excellent way to transport passengers safely
without any police hassle. Then who
should arrive? None other than Jean-Paul
Belmondo, star of Godard’s BREATHLESS, a film where he becomes an instantly
recognizable star, but in this film he hasn’t yet been discovered, so it’s fun
to watch him in an early performance where he’s just another character, Eric
Stark, unattached and unaffiliated, a lone wolf who boasts of working alone,
“Nobody’s ever made decisions for me.”
Wearing an oversized overcoat, with a cigarette constantly dangling from
his mouth, the guy breathes spontaneity, bringing plenty of brash energy and
hard-boiled style to the picture. On
route to Paris, he witnesses a guy harassing a girl on the side of the road,
stopping to intervene, knocking the guy out with a single punch, turning to the
girl in distress, none other than Sandra Milo as Liliane, and offering her a
boyish smile of charming innocence, “The good thing about me is my left.” With that, he invites the girl along for the
ride, discovering she’s an aspiring actress, playing nurse to Davos, his head
covered in bandages, supposedly from head trauma. After crossing one of those wondrous bridges
over the Seine River, the shot of them dropping her off in Paris, with the
Eiffel Tower perfectly centered in the background, is priceless. But instead of being happy to see him, Davos
notices his former partners are reluctant to get involved, growing angry and
irritated at the their squeamishness, finding it completely disgusting. These are guys he once risked everything for,
and now they’re too scared to move a muscle.
Tragically, this scenario only grows worse, so Eric, out of respect,
sets him up in an empty room in his building, allowing him time to figure out
what’s next. The contrast between the
two is interesting, with Belmondo continually flashing his youthful charisma,
especially in his romantic adventures with Sandra Milo, while Ventura is
weighted down by his own self-inflicted scars, bruised by the grim reality of
his profession. Finding an old army
buddy of his father’s working in a maritime museum, a retired sea captain
provides a safe home in the country where his kids can live. Eric even offers to partner up with Davos,
having just lost his regular partner, but now it’s the old man who wants to
work alone, too proud apparently to accept the offer, but also sensing his
world is constricting from the police moving in, interrogating his
acquaintances, putting the squeeze on.
But first, Davos makes the rounds himself, putting the muscle on those
that refused to come through for him, turning on them with a vengeance,
becoming a Hellish picture of damnation, where at least in his eyes, there’s
nothing worse than betrayal, where the souls of all his former associates are
damned. By him! Even with a small fortune in his pocket and a
one-way ticket to America, the guy is doomed, sadly sensing the end is near,
walking around like there’s already a noose around his neck. This bleak and melancholic film is all about
developing the claustrophobic interior world, where there are no longer any
wide open spaces left, just the dreariness of a few small rooms. One of the more touching scenes involves a
chambermaid (Betty Schneider), perhaps his last friend in the world, who
cautiously offers him assistance during a police raid. It’s a completely unsentimental moment, set
up by an earlier scene where he showed her some kindness, but the moment is
fleeting, with only a voiceover narration drawing the film to a close, offering
a sense of quiet resignation. According
to the author, Joseph Damiani, “Classe
tous risques is the best film adaptation of any of my books. It doesn’t have any nightclub scenes. It doesn’t treat the subject as
folklore. And it has more heart than Le deuxième souffle.”
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