Razzia sur la Chnouf (1955) - film review

International drug baron Henri Ferré, nicknamed ’Le Nantais’, is tasked with restructuring a narcotics ring operating in Paris.  The gangster head Paul Liski provides him with a cover, a bar named Le Troquet, not realising that Ferré is in fact working for the police.  Far from supporting the drugs racket, Ferré’s mission is to break it once and for all…

Jean Becker’s 1953 film Touchez pas au grisbi allowed actor Jean Gabin to re-invent his screen persona, becoming the tough patriarchal figure that would predominate in his post-WWII film career.  In Razzia sur la Chnouf, Gabin appears to reprise the role he played in Grisbi , playing opposite Lino Ventura who also starred in that earlier film.  The twist is that Gabin’s character in this film turns out to be a good guy, and, significantly, this is the first time in his career that the actor played a law enforcer.   The film also cemented Lino Ventura’s own screen image as the rough introspective outlaw, an image that was to become intimately associated with French thrillers of the following three decades.

With its natural locations and documentary-style narrative form, Razzia sur la Chnouf is in marked contrast to most policiers of this period, and is much closer in style to the thrillers of the following decade.  The film was widely condemned in France for its realistic portrayal of the destructive effect of drugs on individuals, although from the point of view of its artistic and social content it was years ahead of its time.

© James Travers 2004

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