Film Review
The director Claude Sautet is best remembered for the series of films - intimate
and subtle explorations of the relationships between men and women - that
represent the bulk of his creative output, beginning with
Les Choses de la vie
(1970) and concluding with
Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud
(1995). Given the tremendous impact that these films have made, it
is too easily forgotten that Sautet's first major commercial and critical
success was in an altogether different register, namely the classic French
polar.
Classe tous risques not only put Claude Sautet on the
map (he had helmed one film prior to this, a limp comedy titled
Bonjour sourire that he
was right to disown), it also helped to establish one of French cinema's
most enduring icons, Jean-Paul Belmondo, whilst also kick-starting the career
of another French film legend, Lino Ventura.
With its solid casting, authentic writing and abundance of production flair,
Classe tous risques stands apart from most French crime films of its
time and fits effortlessly into the Nouvelle Vague era. It is an inspired
adaptation of a novel of the same title by José Giovanni, which had
been published just a few years previously. A former convicted criminal
(who narrowly escaped death by execution just after the war), Giovanni had
forged a new career as a crime writer with
Le Trou, his account of a prison
escape in which he was involved. After Jacques Becker's adaptation
of
Le Trou had proven a success, Giovanni was soon busy writing the
screenplay of his subsequent novel,
Classe tous risques. This
second success led Giovanni to adapt several other of his novels and in next
to no time he was one of French cinema's most prolific and respected screenwriters
in the crime genre.
In all of his crime novels, José Giovanni drew heavily on his firsthand
experience of the Parisian underworld (known locally as
Le Milieu).
The central protagonist in
Classe tous risques, Abel Davos, was closely
modelled on a notorious gangster and Gestapo hitman Abel Danos (nicknamed
le Mammouth), whom Giovanni had met whilst incarcerated at the Santé
Prison, not long after the Liberation. The book and the film totally
ignore Danos's grubby dealings with the Gestapo and present him as a sympathetic
world-weary hoodlum keen to put his criminal past behind him, in true film
noir fashion. Interestingly, one of Danos's criminal associates was
the equally infamous Pierre Loutrel, who is better known as Pierrot le fou
- the name that was attached to a character played by Belmondo in a
later film by Jean-Luc Godard.
Claude Sautet was not such an unlikely choice of director for
Classe
tous risques as it now seems. He had worked as an assistant on
Georges Franju's eerily atmospheric
Les Yeux sans visage
(1959) and had demonstrated a natural flair for the hard-boiled crime thriller
with
Le Fauve est lâché
(1959), on which he was employed as a screenwriter, with Lino Ventura in
the lead role. As in this latter film, Sautet took his inspiration
more from American crime films of the 1950s than contemporary French films,
and this shows itself in the film's crisp modernity and its relentless, often
viscerally shocking, grittiness. A large part of the film was shot
on location (in Milan, Nice and Paris), using techniques that we now associate
with the French New Wave. A daylight heist scene near the start of
the film was filmed in a busy Italian square with hidden cameras, so naturally
the reaction of the surrounding crowds is one of genuine panic and concern.
Ghislain Cloquet's photography effectively combines the high contrast stylisation
that we associate with classic American film noir with a more prosaic, near-documentary
realism - and this gives the impression of a film that is both comfortingly
familiar and frighteningly unpredictable, a dramatic collision of the banal
and the fantastic. At a time when the crime film in France had
been virtually mined out and was becoming ripe for parody (often with Ventura
grudgingly helping to send the genre up, as in
Le Gorille vous salue
bien),
Classe tous risques gave it a fierce new lease of life.
The film was a hit with the public and the critics, attracting an audience
of 1.7 million in France. By contrast, Sautet's next attempt at a crime
film,
L'Arme à gauche
(1965), was a dismal failure (despite the presence of Ventura in the lead
role) and this led the director to give up the genre altogether.
For Lino Ventura, the opportunity to play a more rounded and believable character,
as opposed to the wearyingly familiar gangster or action hero archetypes,
was a godsend and effectively saved his career just as disillusionment was
beginning to set in. Giovanni's obvious sympathy for his subject (thankfully
the author does not shy away from the abject brutality of his milieu) gives
Ventura a far more fully developed and complex character to play with than
usual, and it's hardly an accident that
Classe tous risques shows
the actor at his absolute best - devastatingly fragile in some scenes, utterly
ruthless in others, convincing throughout as man who, whilst badly bruised
and warped by his criminal dealings, still manages to retain some vestige
of decency. The tenderness that Ventura's character elicits in his
gentle, down-to-earth scenes with his children makes a sharp and revealing
counterpoint to what we see later on in the film, when he turns on his gangster
associates and cold-bloodedly executes them.
Jean-Paul Belmondo was still a virtual unknown at the time he was cast in
Classe tous risques. It wasn't until the release of Jean-Luc
Godard's
À bout de souffle
in March 1960 (just a few weeks before Sautet's film was released) that he
could rightly be called a star. In fact, Sautet had to fight hard to
secure Belmondo for the supporting role of Éric Stark, a likeable
rookie hoodlum as yet unscarred by his underworld associations. The
producers wanted a more established actor (Laurent Terzieff or Alain Delon)
for the part, and it was only after a long standoff which almost derailed
by the project that Sautet finally won through, backed to the hilt by Ventura.
Sautet's faith in Belmondo was amply rewarded - the actor's casual juvenile
charm and boyish innocence made the perfect complement to Ventura's aura
of bruised and jaded introspection that reveals a man completely worn down
by the grim reality of his profession. Sautet and Giovanni both deserve
credit for the authenticity and artistry they bring to the film, but ultimately
it is the inspired Ventura-Belmondo pairing that makes it so compelling,
poignant and memorable. It's hardly a surprise that these two great
actors should be called upon to reprise their arresting screen partnership
a few years later - in Henri Verneuil's
Cent mille dollars
au soleil (1964). By this time, the careers of both actors
were well and truly on the up. It would be another six years before
Claude Sautet returned to leave his mark on French cinema.
© James Travers 2016
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Next Claude Sautet film:
L'Arme à gauche (1965)