Classe Tous Risques

dir. Claude Sautet
France, 1960

One of those great French gangster films from the postwar era. Stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a very smiley semi-gangster, helping out full-on gangster Lino Ventura (who always plays these roles and always does it amazingly) when he goes on the run with his two young kids. What's so great about the French gangster film, especially of this period, is the layer of existential dread that lies underneath the subject matter - in this film, Ventura's character is at his most powerful and happiest at the start of the film, and from then on it's downhill. I can't remember what other Ventura film I saw in which he plays a gangster on the run (or was it someone from the resistance?) but the scenes where he's alone in a dull room in a boarding house, hiding out from the world, not leaving his room were almost carbon copies of whatever that other film was. They verge on iconic. The human - ie: dull, lonely - side of being a career criminal.