Touchez pas au grisbi (1954)

Touchez pas au grisbi is a French thriller film first released in 1954, directed by Jacques Becker.  The film is based on a novel by Albert Simonin and stars Jean Gabin, René Dary, Jeanne Moreau, Lino Ventura and Dora Doll.  It has also been released under the title: Grisbi.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Max and Riton are two ageing gangsters who have just pulled off a spectacular gold bullion robbery at Orly airport.  Both men hope to retire gracefully on their ill-gotten gains but their plans are jeopardised when Riton says more than he should to his mistress Josy.  It is through Josy that a rival gangster named Angelo gets to hear about Max and Riton’s successful heist and decides to relive them of the eight gold bars they are struggling to convert into cash.   With Josy’s connivance, Angelo kidnaps Riton and threatens to kill him unless Max hands over the stolen gold.  Max must choose between a comfortable retirement and saving the life of a troublesome friend...

Touchez pas au grisbi occupies a pivotal place in French cinema history.  Not only did it allow the actor Jean Gabin to win back his popular public following after a decade that saw him fade into comparative obscurity, but it firmly established the film policier as a major genre in France, a genre that would come to predominate in French cinema for the next three decades.   When it was first released, Grisbi was a major box office hit in France, drawing an audience of 4.7 million.  The reason for the film’s popularity is easily accounted for.  In the early 1950s, there had been a great public demand in France for American crime films, something which home-grown directors had attempted to tap into with films such as La Môme vert-de-gris (1953), which kicked off the Lemmy Caution series (starring American import Eddie Constantine).   The French had acquired a taste for hard-boiled thrillers and this voracious appetite for crime-based escapism was about to be satisfied with a vengeance. 

What distinguishes Grisbi from the early French gangster films of the 1950s is that it does not attempt to slavishly emulate the American model, but instead shows us recognisably French characters in an unmistakably French setting - true French film noir rather than a bland copy of its Hollywood counterpart.  Along with two other classic gangster films that immedately followed in its wake - Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes (1955) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1955) - Grisbi provided the template for virtually all subsequent French crime thrillers.  The film is based on a novel by crime writer Albert Simonin, the first in a trilogy of books featuring the character Max le Menteur - the other two novels would later be adapted as Le Cave se rebiffe and Les Tontons flingueurs.  In case you were wondering, grisbi is Parisian slang for money (not to be confused with Rigsby, a character in a popular British TV sitcom).  One of the most iconic ingredients of the film is its famous Grisbi theme, played on the harmonica by Jean Wiener and composed by Marc Lanjean.  The following year, the theme became a hit single (under the title Le Grisbi), performed by the celebrated jazz musician Aimé Barelli.

In making this film, director Jacques Becker took his inspiration from American film noir gangster films of the 1940s, adopting many of the familiar film noir motifs but giving them a noticeable Gallic twist.  The extreme stylisation that most characterises American film noir is toned down and used in a far more subtle manner in Becker’s film, something that gives it a chic modernity and far greater sense of realism.  Another significant departure from the classic American gangster film is that Grisbi is far more concerned with character than plot.  Had the film been made in Hollywood, the heist which kicks off the story would doubtless have been included as a major set-piece.  Becker not only omits to show us the heist but he introduces us to it almost en passant, via a brief shot of a newspaper article reporting the crime.  The film is not about the mechanics of crime, but rather about the psychology of those who make their living by crime.  The noir-style gangster trappings are little more than window dressing for what is really an intelligent exploration of universal themes: friendship, loyalty and the trauma of growing old.  The plot may take in a daring robbery and vicious gang warfare, but what it is really about is a late middle-aged man being forced to re-evaluate his life and decide what matters most to him.  Grisbi or not grisbi, that is the question.

There had been a long tradition of gangster films in French cinema prior to Touchez pas au Grisbi, previous examples including such classics as Julien Duvivier’s Pepé le Moko (1937), Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes (1938) and Maurice Tourneur’s Impasse des deux anges (1948).  What most sets Grisbi apart from its predecessors is its restrained, naturalistic approach, which gives the film a modern edge and brutality not seen before.  In contrast to the crime films of the 1930s and 40s, the characters in Grisbi are tougher, rougher and appear far more habitués to the rough and tumble of gangster life.  The female characters hardly flinch when they are slapped about by the men who think they own them (the most shocking thing about the film when seen today), whilst the hoodlums handle machine guns as casually as umbrellas and hardly think twice about torturing an opponent for information.  What makes the film’s few bursts of aggression appear all the more shocking is that they arise so casually and unexpectedly.  The stillness and elegance of Becker’s mise-en-scène gives the spectator a false sense of security, making him or her totally unprepared for the visceral intensity of the violence when it erupts.  Maybe this is why the film’s dramatic climax, in which the two rival gangs confront one another in explosive film noir fashion, is so effective and so memorable.

Touchez pas au grisbi is the film that rehabilitated Jean Gabin after a period of decline and allowed him to reinvent his screen persona.  Gone forever was the Gabin of the pre-WWII époque, the romantic working class hero with matinee idol good looks and an aura of tragic vulnerability.  The new Gabin that we see in Grisbi is very different -  older, quieter, far more imposing and yet darkly introspective.  This was Gabin Mark II - the patriarch, the boss, you might even say the Godfather.  For the rest of his career, this is the kind of role that Gabin would be most comfortable with, projecting an air of invulnerable and patriarchal self-reliance, yet also conveying something of a man who is struggling to come to grips with an inner existential crisis.  The role of Max le Menteur fits Gabin perfectly and allows the actor to give what is, arguably, the finest performance of his post-WWII period.   Things might have been very different if Daniel Gélin hadn’t declined the role when it was first offered to him, thereby providing Gabin with the biggest break of his career.   Gabin was awarded the Coupe Volpi for the Best Actor at the 1954 Venice Film Festival for his role in Grisbi and Marcel Carné’s L’Air de Paris.
    
Not only did this film resurrect one screen icon (Gabin) it also allowed another, Lino Ventura, to make an auspicious debut.  Prior to this, Ventura had pursued a successful career as a professional wrestler, under his birth name Angelo Borrini.  It was through a chance encounter with Jacques Becker that Ventura landed the main supporting role in Grisbi (a gangster named Angelo).  Within a few years, Lino Ventura would establish himself as the archetypal hard man of French cinema, almost invariably cast as hardened gangster-types or redoubtable crime fighters, thuggish characters who were the exact opposite to the actor’s true nature.  Ventura and Gabin became the closest of friends whilst making Grisbi and would work together on several other classic French films, including Razzia sur la Chnouf (1955), Le Rouge est mis (1957) and Le Clan des Siciliens (1969).   Another leading light of French cinema, Jeanne Moreau, also appears in the film, in one of her early glamour-puss roles, along with Gabin’s first wife Gaby Basset and Miss America 1946, Marilyn Buferd.

Touchez pas au grisbi was not only crucial in defining the policier genre, it also represents something of a transition between the old quality cinema of the past and the new cinema that was about to break through with the emergence of the French New Wave.  Jacques Becker was one of a handful of directors active in the late 1940s, early 1950s, who lay between the two camps represented by the old guard and the young Turks, mavericks who made films that both presaged and inspired the early offerings of the nouvelle vague.  Becker’s Grisbi was particularly influential, not only motivating his contemporary Jean-Pierre Melville to devote much of his career to make films in the gangster genre, but also providing the inspiration for notable noir-style thriller offerings from two of the leading figures of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard (À bout de souffle) and François Truffaut (Tirez sur le pianiste).  The obvious stylistic and thematic similarities between Grisbi and most of the films policiers made in France over the next two decades reveal how extraordinarily influential Jacques Becker’s film was.  This was to French film noir what The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity had been to its American equivalent - a film that captured the Zeitgeist and changed the landscape of cinema forever.

© James Travers 2001-2010

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