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Truands fatigués, as Truffaut would have it, bodies in the crowd. The hood (Lino Ventura) has surprising spiritual resonance and a death sentence hanging over his head, his introduction in Milan is just the latest pit stop in a life on the run. The aftermath of the robbery is a tour de force of movement (the getaway has the camera on the hood of the car as it zips across the street, it continues by motorcycle and on foot), but it's in the shades of taciturn tenderness between the underworld mugs that Claude Sautet finds his groove. The escape to Nice costs him wife (Simone France) and partner (Stan Krol), he hides with his sons as the police draw closer. Old Paris cohorts aren't thrilled about his return, the plan involves a fake ambulance with a fake driver (Jean-Paul Belmondo), along the way they add a fake nurse (Sandra Milo), "part of the trip." Walsh material, Tourneur quietude, a sadder, more human Melville. The Sautet beach (cp. Les Choses de la Vie, César et Rosalie) here sets the stage for a machine-gun skirmish, the execution in the car of the double-dealing fence (Marcel Dalio) reappears in Le Deuxième Souffle, the Umberto D. maid is remembered. Amid the gangland existentialism, a shapely compression of romance: Belmondo picks up Milo during her theatrical rehearsal, cut to flirtations at the seafood restaurant, cut to his flat for deep talk over caged birds, dissolve to an empty frame as the elevator carrying the couple plunges into view, they're kissing. (On happiness: "You stop believing it, and then it happens.") The demise of the classical crook in the year of À Bout de Souffle, properly understood by Yates (The Friends of Eddie Coyle). With Michel Ardan, Claude Cerval, Betty Schneider, Michèle Méritz, France Asselin, and Philippe March. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |