Les Grandes gueules (1966) - film review

After spending 20 years in Canada, Hector Valentin returns to his family home in Vosges, France, to inherit his father’s run-down sawmill.  Despite strong competition from a rival firm, who have more up-to-date equipment, Hector is determined to make a success of his father’s former wood-cutting business.  By a stroke of luck, he runs into two unemployed men, Laurent and Mick who are looking for work.  Laurent persuades Hector to recruit a group of prisoners on parole.  At first, the arrangement works out well – Hector manages to get the sawmill working again and his business is soon in production.  Then things begin to turn sour.   First, Hector’s competitors start to use foul play to try and wreck his business.  Then Laurent loses interest when he realises that a man he had sworn to take revenge on is not in the group of prisoners, as he had reckoned.  Hector’s dream soon turns into a nightmare…

A striking combination of action thriller and sardonic western, Les Grandes gueules is probably the French film that comes closest in style and substance to the tough Hollywood cowboy films of the 1950s and 1960s.  With its expansive location photography (which makes the best of the Vosges setting), rough characters and rough-and-tumble set-tos, the film certainly bears a striking similarity to the traditional American western.

The film was based on a novel by José Giovanni, a popular writer who began writing thriller novels before turning to film making.  One of the most accomplished exponents of the thriller genre, Giovanni manages to bring to his dramas a sense of hard-edged realism and authenticity, and this shows in the films that he both scripted and directed.  In Les Grandes gueules, Giovanni had the good fortune to work with director Robert Enrico, who also distinguished himself in the thriller line.  Enrico’s tough brand of film noir was widely appreciated in the 1970s, the decade when the policier genre was at the height of its popularity.

Les Grandes gueules benefits from a strong cast, made up mainly of archetypal hard guys, including the hardest of them all (at least in French cinema of the 1960s), Lino Ventura.  The casting of Bourvil as Hector is perhaps unexpected but works perfectly.  Although better known for his comic performances, Bourvil had proven that he can take on straight roles, and here he is challenged with possibly the most serious part in his career – and he pulls it off magnificently.  The Bourvil-Ventua pairing works surprisingly well, their bond of comradeship showing an obvious tension, and their final scenes together have a genuine sense of pathos.

François De Roubaix’s atmospheric music complements the film’s alternately alluring and moody photography, both emphasising the beauty and austerity of the location.

Far from being a shallow imitation of the Hollywood western, this film takes the best elements of that genre and fashions a unique and powerful drama around the themes of companionship, revenge and redemption.

© James Travers 2000

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?