Objectif: 500 millions (1966) - film review

Paris, 1966.  Richau, a former captain in the French paratroop regiment, has just been released from prison after serving a term for participating in an uprising during the Algerian War.  He is embittered by the way he has been treated and is ready to take revenge against the man who put him behind bars, Douard.  Unable to find work, he is contacted by Yo, a young fashion model, who proposes he helps her steal 500 million francs from a plane whilst in flight between Paris and Bordeaux.  Richau is not happy when he learns that his enemy Douard is the mastermind behind the operation, but he decides to defer his vendetta and agrees to take part in the robbery.  Once he has the money, he will deal with Douard in his own time...

It was the immense success of La 317e section (1965) which led independent film producer Georges de Beauregard to invite director Pierre Schoendoerffer to make his first, and only, genre film.  Too easily overlooked, Objectif: 500 millions is one of the more respectable French heist movies of the 1960s, a film that pays homage to American film noir thrillers of the previous decade whilst also offering a sombre reflection on contemporary France.   It many ways, it is the odd man out in Schoendoerffer’s filmography, more stylised, more plot-driven than any other of his films, but it does include some of his familiar motifs, notably references to the atrocities and injustices of war.

Despite its recycled film noir and caper movie trappings, Objectif: 500 millions is primarily an incisive commentary on the way that war veterans are neglected, even forgotten, once they return to civilian life.  The film is very much a forerunner of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), in that its central character, Richau, superbly portrayed by Bruno Cremer, is bitterly disillusioned with his war time experiences and cannot find a way back into normal life.  As the film’s final sequence powerfully demonstrates, Richau (like Travis Bickle) is incapable of putting his military past behind him, and his civilian life becomes a personal combat that is no more than an extension of his traumatic experiences in Algeria.  Partnered with Cremer is the stunningly beautiful Marisa Mell, a diva of the Italian B-movie who, as she parades in front of the camera in her tight-fitting catsuits and diving suits, cannot help looking like Emma Peel’s sultry twin sister.

The film’s striking high contrast black and white photography simultaneously evokes the early films of the French New Wave (Schoendoerffer is clearly influenced by Jean-Luc Godard - note the similarities with Le Petit soldat) as well as classic American film noir.  In true film noir fashion, most of the film takes place at night, the suffocating darkness brutally pierced by blinding neons and car lights, the impression conveyed being one of unremitting oppression and danger.  The final showdown takes place in a deserted seaside town that looks like the set of an old Hollywood western, a crude but effective reminder that the film noir thriller is only a variation on the western theme. 

Pierre Jansen’s jarring score is loaded with menace and, like a mystical incantation, chillingly evokes the dark primal forces that are driving the main protagonists to their inescapable doom.  The last twenty minutes or so of the film are unbearably tense, even though the outcome is, by this stage, pretty obvious.  Pierre Schoendoerffer wrote the screenplay with Jorge Semprún, the latter’s first screenwriting credit.  Subsequently, Semprún would become a close collaborator of Alain Resnais and Costa-Gavras, on films such as La Guerre est finie (1966) and Z (1969).   Objectif: 500 millions is far from being Pierre Schoendoerffer’s best film, but it is one of his most compelling and most beautifully crafted works, a film with an important underlying social message whilst also being a superlative example of French film noir at its most inspired.

© James Travers 2012

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