Razzia sur la Chnouf (1955)
Directed by Henri Decoin

Film Review

Gallimard's publication of American pulp fiction crime novels in its celebrated Série Noire range was one of the most significant cultural phenomenon to hit France in the decade following the end of the Second World War. Not only would it have a massive impact on the reading habits of the French nation, with home-grown crime writers such as Auguste Le Breton, Albert Simonin and José Giovanni fuelling the craze with their own experience of the Parisian criminal underground ('Le Milieu' as it is quaintly known), it would also have major implications for French cinema. Crime films had been popular in France since the 1920s but it was only in the mid-1950s that the film policier became the predominant genre, its popularity shored up not only by crime novels but also by the belated arrival of American film noir into French cinemas from the late 1940s onwards.

Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) was the film that firmly established the policier in France in the mid-1950s, creating a template for a distinctly Gallic form of film noir that would remain incredibly popular for over two decades. It was a crucial film for its lead actor, Jean Gabin, who had been struggling unsuccessfully to rebuild his career after his return to France following an aborted attempt to make a name for himself in Hollywood in the early 1940s. Grisbi not only made Gabin a star again, it also transformed his screen image - almost beyond recognition. No longer was he the romantic hero, a symbol of the noble proletariat, the heroic dreamer, an innocent caught up in the cruel web of fate. This new, prematurely aged Gabin was a tough, implacable, earthy patriarchal type, the kind you cannot help but refer to as 'le Patron'. In Becker's film he is the archetypal world-weary gangster, and this is the screen persona that would stick with Gabin for much of his remaining career.

The success of Grisbi immediately led Gabin to be cast in a similar hard-as-nails role in another gangster film, Razzia sur la Chnouf, directed this time by Henri Decoin and based on a novel by Auguste Le Breton. (It so happened that an adaptation of another Le Breton adaptation would be released exactly one week after Decoin's film - Jules Dassin's Du rififi chez les hommes, another defining example of French film noir). Decoin had already delivered some notable examples of film noir in the 1940s - Le Bienfaiteur (1942), Les Inconnus dans la maison (1942), Non coupable (1947), Entre onze heures et minuit (1949) - and the only reason why he is far less well-regarded than his contemporaries (Becker, Duvivier, Carné) is because he lost his way towards the end of his career and ended up churning out a succession of lamentable potboilers.

Razzia sur la Chnouf was the last unequivocally great film that Decoin made, coming not long after his superlative Georges Simenon adaptation La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (1952) in which Gabin had also played the lead role. Decoin was so in awe of Becker's film that he used it as a model for Razzia, even going so far as to hire Grisbi's cinematographer Pierre Montazel to replicate the distinctive look and feel of the earlier film. The choice of Gabin for the lead role was a no-brainer given this had been the chief reason for the success of Grisbi, and the similarity between the film is further heightened by the casting of former professional wrestler Lino Ventura in a virtually identical role to the one he had played in Becker's film - Gabin's animalistic counterpart, more physical, more emotional and more feral, but just as tough.

When it was first released, Razzia sur la Chnouf drew considerable criticism in some quarters for its uncomfortably realistic portrayal of drugs dealers and drugs users. At the time, the film was certainly breaking new ground, dispensing with the sanitised clichés as it drives us into the seedy underground lairs where addicts in varying degrees of decrepitude are seen buying and consuming narcotics, before showing us how narcotics are manufactured and distributed as part of a remarkably organised network that is fiercely regimented by gun-toting thugs. It's an incredibly violent film for its time, and the almost total absence of background music and Decoin's distanced, near-documentary approach make the occasional bursts of extreme violence all the more shocking and visceral.

When the bullets fly and the punches land, which they do with alarming regularity, you can feel the pain of those on the receiving end. This is a horribly brutal and unforgiving milieu that Decoin forces us into, and most other French policiers of this decade are woefully mild in comparison. Here we have a glimpse of the grittier, nastier thrillers that would become de rigueur in later decades, together with the almost obsessive attention to detail that we associate with the genre's 'godfathers' - Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Deray. The ingenious ways in which parcels of drugs (the 'chnouf' of the film's title) are passed on to users - some hidden in telephone directories, others cleverly concealed in furniture on the Paris metro - carry a coolly Melvillian touch.

Gabin's interpretation of a supposedly seasoned racketeer nicknamed Le Nantais is the biggest shock the film has in store. There's little, if any, of the charm we associate with Gabin (this surfaces only briefly, right at the end of the film). Le Nantais is not your usual gangster archetype, a mindless thug with a gun. Most of the time he is on screen, he resembles an ordinary businessman who plies his trade as if it were completely legitimate, seemingly oblivious to its criminal associations. Only when he encounters resistance does the deadlier, more unforgiving side of his nature become apparent, and then we see just how harsh and morally deficient an individual Le Nantais is. "Can this really be Jean Gabin we are watching?" you ask yourself as his latest screen persona goes about stamping moral decency into the ground whilst pursuing the most despicable of trades.

In a memorably gruesome ensemble of iron-fisted tough guys and venomous females, desperate druggies and conniving cops that are every bit as ruthless as the criminals they are after, it is Gabin who leaves the deepest and sourest impression. Here we have the most tacitly loathsome of the actor's screen portrayals up until this point and yet, when the mask falls and Le Nantais's real identity is suddenly exposed in the final act, you can't help feeling more cheated than relieved. When he emerges from this chilling journey into the Stygian core of the Parisian underworld, a putrid corner of Hell that reeks of opium, cordite and crushed human detritus, Jean Gabin looks like a man who has finally found himself. Le Patron has arrived.

Film Synopsis

Paul Liski runs the biggest drugs trafficking operation in France but things are not going well. He needs someone he can trust to restructure his entire organisation so that it can expand its reach whilst evading the forces of law and order. Henri Ferré, an internationally renowned drugs baron known as Le Nantais, seems to be the ideal man for the job. Liski provides Ferré with a cover - a popular bar named Le Troquet - and strong-arm men to protect him from rival gangs and the police. Ferré quickly discovers multiple failings in Liski's operation and sets about making it safer and more profitable. But as he does so, the police seem to be getting ever closer, threatening to undermine Ferré's efforts to build an unbreakable drugs ring at the heart of the French capital. It soon becomes apparent that there is a traitor in the organisation - but who?