128 - Consider All Risks (Classe tous Risques), 1960, France/Italy. Dir. Claude Sautet.

Monday, May 8, 2017

128 - Consider All Risks (Classe tous Risques), 1960, France/Italy. Dir. Claude Sautet.

Bam!

That is the sound of Abel Davos's gun.

Abel is played by the great Lino Ventura.  Ventura entered the scene in 1954 with Jacques Becker's crime drama Touchez Pas au Grisbi, starring Jean Gabin. and Jeanne Moreau.  We have seen him in two Jean-Pierre Melville films: Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966) and Army of Shadows (1969).  We will see him again tomorrow in Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows (1958).

He is with his partner Naldi.  Raymond Naldi.  Played by Stan Krol.

They have been in Italy.  Milan.  Abel has his wife and two young boys with him.  They went to Italy to flee from France.  Where Abel was sentenced to death.

While in Milan they hold-up two officers who are carrying bank bags, get away by foot, steal a car, and find 500,000 lira in their possession.  Naldi gets a motorcycle and they race one in front of the other through the countryside.  They get to a roadblock.  Naldi turns off the road and rides over the hill.  All the officers chase him.  Abel in the car gets around the roadblock.  He drives into town looking for Naldi.

Naldi abandons the motorcycle on the hill, runs down into town, and steals a car by gunpoint.  The two men find each other again on the road and get back into one car.  They drive it to a bus stop and ditch it and take the bus and reunite with Abel's family.

They charter a boat to France and throw the boat driver into the sea.  Then they throw him the life preserver.

When they land ashore two officers come out of the trees and surprise them, and the gunfight begins.

Abel and Naldi shoot both officers but not before they get Naldi and his wife Therese.

Now Abel is on his own.  Alone with his children.  He takes them into a church and explains to the older one that he will have to lead his little brother, following their dad at a distance so as not to appear to be together, and yet not getting separated.  If you do get separated, take shelter in a church and ask for the priest.  I will come and find you.

And now we begin our journey.

Abel will make sure that his children are taken care of.

He will turn to his old partners and friends in France for help.

They will betray him.  They will send a stranger to help him, assuming that he will not make it and that the stranger will take the rap for it.

The stranger just happens to be Stark.  Eric Stark.

Played by the one-and-only Jean-Paul Belmondo.

The director of this film, Claude Sautet, discovered Belmondo before Godard did.  Before Godard cast him in Breathless.  Before Belmondo was an international sensation.

When Sautet cast him, Belmondo was unknown, unexperienced, and a Big Risk.

Sautet felt that Belmondo was different.  Special.  He observed, "When he walks into bars, you feel it, like a kind of current."

Presence.

Electricity.

Sautet knew what he was doing.

His Producer, Bob Amon, did not know what he was doing.

He said, "With a face like that, audiences will want their money back."

Audiences did not want their money back.  They kept giving it.  Willingly.

That was nearly 60 years ago, and Belmondo, who is still alive at age 84, has made many millions of dollars for himself and for his producers.

One of the men who betrays Abel is Raoul Fargier, played by Claude Cerval.  We have seen him as the croupier Jean in Melville's Bob le Flambeur (1956), as the priest in in Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958), and as Clovis in Chabrol's Les Cousins (1959).  We will see him again in Luis Bunuel's Belle du Jour (1967).

The man who plays the fence, Arthur Gibelin, is the great Marcel Dalio.  Wow!  What a cast this is.  These actors from different eras and areas working here together.  Delicious.

Dalio is a giant of an actor, working from 1931 to 1980.  We have seen him several times.  He played Lieutenant Rosenthal in Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937), L'Arbi in Duvivier's Pepe le Moko (1937)--both opposite Jean Gabin--and the Marquis in Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939).  He moved effortlessly back and forth between France and Hollywood and played in many American as well as French films, including Casablanca and To Have and Have Not.

The fence is a great character here, because he does more than take diamonds and give money.  He is active.  And he gets himself killed.

Jose Giovanni, the screenwriter, had been sentenced to death and spent time on death row.  His sentence was commuted and he was later pardoned.  He spent the rest of his life working as a novelist, screenwriter, and director, writing often about the lives of gangsters and prisoners.  His films include Jacques Becker's Le Trou ("The Hole," or prison) (1960), Jean Becker's A Man Named Rocca (1961), and Jean Melville's Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966).

Giovanni said he met the real Abel Davos on death row, when Davos was put there before trial to keep him safe from other prisoners, and that he learned his story from him.

Claude Sautet, the director, was a 1st AD for many directors on many films, including some we have seen.  He spent a lot of time improving upon other people's scripts and directorial choices.  He made other people's movies better.  So it came time for him to launch out on his own.

One of the ingredients that makes this film exciting to watch is its physicality.  Ventura was a former wrestler, and he uses his prowess here in scenes of sudden violence.  Stan Krol, his partner, was an adventurer, who had wanted to fly an airplane under the Eiffel Tower.  These men were ready to rumble, and Sautet let them.

It is refreshing to see a film made at the start of the French New Wave which has nothing to do with the French New Wave.

Sautet is not trying to reinvent cinema.  He is not trying to announce the death of cinema.  He is not building pedestals for himself to stand on.  He is not posing as a new god of film.  He is simply making good movies.  This was the first of thirteen he directed.

And it is juicy.