Le Rouge est mis (1957)
Directed by Gilles Grangier

Film Review

By the mid-1950s, Jean Gabin had regained his status (temporarily lost in the 1940s) as one of the leading lights of French cinema - no longer the idealised and usually doomed romantic hero of his early years (Le Quai des brumes, La Grande illusion), but an archetypal heavy perfectly suited for tough roles such as hoodlums and hard-bitten detectives.  It was his participation in Jacques Becker's classic noir thriller Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) that securely anchored him in this kind of role, although the new, tougher persona had been gestating since Gabin's return to French cinema in the mid-to-late 1940s.  Le Rouge est mis is typical of the kind of film that Gabin seemed to be most comfortable with in his refashioned, anti-hero form, a hard-boiled gangster film that owes as much to classic America film noir as it does to France's splendid tradition of série noir crime fiction.  The film was in fact based on a novel by one of the latter's leading exponents, Auguste Le Breton, whose books had frequently been reinterpreted for French cinema, most successfully by Jules Dassin as Du rififi chez les hommes (1955) and Henri Verneuil as Le Clan des Siciliens (1969).
   
Le Rouge est mis was Gabin's fourth collaboration with the prolific (and unfairly overlooked) director Gilles Grangier.  The two men worked together on eleven films in total, their most successful being slick thriller offerings in which most could be made of Gabin's reinvented hard-man persona - Le Cave se rebiffe (1961), Maigret voit rouge (1963) and Le Désordre et la nuit (1958).  Whilst Grangier was an immensely versatile filmmaker, just as adept at turning out crowd-pleaser comedies like La Cuisine au beurre (1963), he was at his best in the murky world of the crime-thriller, and some of his polar offerings stand up well compared with those of better-known directors of the genre - Jacques Deray, Georges Lautner and Jean-Pierre Melville.

Many of Grangier's films were scripted by the immensely talented screenwriter Michel Audiard and Le Rouge est mis is no exception - perhaps not the duo's most inspired collaboration but a reasonably successful attempt at transposes Le Breton's shadowy underworld to the big screen, complete with the distinctive argot of the criminal class which became a hallmark of this kind of French gangster movie in the 1950s.  As on most of his better films, Grangier assembled an impressive cast, including several actors who became closely associated with this kind of gritty thriller - Paul Frankeur, Marcel Bozzuffi and - most importantly - Lino Ventura.  The latter first appeared with Gabin in Grisbi and would subsequently work with him on many films, their contrasting hard man styles used to great effect on such memorable classics as Henri Decoin's Razzi sur la Chnouf (1955) and Georges Lampin's Crime et chatîment (1956).  Ventura wasn't yet the massive star he would soon become, so his presence in Le Rouge est mis is in a supporting role, but he had such an impact with audiences that he was soon taking centre stage, rivalling Gabin as France's biggest box office draw in popular thrillers such as Le Gorille vous salue bien (1958) and Le Fauve est lâché (1959).  Other notable names in the cast list include up-and-coming star Annie Girardot (just a few years away from Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (1960), the film that made her famous), Gaby Basset (Gabin's first wife and his professional partner early in his career) and Jean-Pierre Mocky, an actor who would turn to filmmaking a few years later and become one of French cinema's most subversive and provocative figures.

Impressive as the supporting cast is, it is Jean Gabin who shines most brightly in Le Rouge est mis, perfectly cast as the uncompromising criminal gang leader hiding beneath a thin but all-too-convincing veneer of respectability.  It is the kind of ambiguous dual role that Gabin excelled in at this stage in his career, strikingly similar to characters he had previously inhabited in Raymond Lamy's Miroir (1947) and Georges Lacombe's Leur dernière nuit (1953).  Overall, it's pretty routine fare with all of the familiar gangster film tropes, but Gabin's solid presence - helped by Audiard's crisp dialogue and Grangier's sharp mise-en-scène - makes it an enjoyable, albeit somewhat predictable, entry in the cordite-scented, testosterone-charged genre in which French cinema excelled throughout the 1950s.

Film Synopsis

Seemingly a law-abiding garage owner, Louis Bertain is in fact the leader of a ruthless gang of crooks that includes Frédo, Pépito and Raymond.  The gang's nefarious activities are untroubled until the fateful day when Louis's younger brother Pierre is released from prison and returns to the city to look up his old mistress Hélène.  Superintendent Pluvier's attempts to coerce Pierre into informing on his brother's criminal activities come to nothing, but he bides his time, knowing that sooner or later Louis will make a fatal error.  Louis offers Pierre work in his garage, providing he agrees never to see Hélène again.  It is a promise that the younger man is quick to offer but has no intention of keeping. 

One evening, Pierre overhears his brother organising his next hold-up with Pépito.  The robbery, of an armoured van carrying 15 million francs, proceeds as planned but it suddenly goes spectacularly wrong.  In the ensuing confusion, Raymond is killed and Pépito is forced to shoot dead the couriers and two motorcycle cops who give chase afterwards.  When the police come to arrest Louis, Pépito convinces himself that they have been betrayed by Pierre.  Seething with anger, he sets off in pursuit of the younger brother to inflict on him a just punishment.  Little does he know that the real culprit has already handed himself over to the police...