For the real smell of old Paris, watch a gangster film
French gangster films from the Fifties and Sixties are often said to be entirely derivative of their American forebears. But anyone who has watched James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart or George Raft in those films from the Thirties will notice little similarity between them and the French masterpieces, which is no bad thing.
During the Fifties and Sixties the French made some of the greatest films in the world, and their gangster films were supreme.
The genre revived the career of one of the greatest French actors, Jean Gabin, a huge star before the war in Pépé le Moko, Le quai des brumes and Le jour se lève, but whose temperamental behaviour had almost made him unemployable. And it launched the career of another legend, Lino Ventura, whose pugilist’s profile betrayed a youth as a boxer and wrestler. His family had fled the poverty of fascist Italy for France in the Twenties.
The two men played thieves who fall out in the film that put Gabin back on the map and unleashed Ventura, Touchez pas au grisbi, released in 1954. Gabin, in expansive and serene middle age, plays a criminal sitting on a fortune in stolen gold; Ventura discovers this, and his gang wants to seize it (the title translates as “don’t touch the loot”).
The robbery isn’t shown: the film is about honour and dishonour among thieves. Gabin’s sidekick, Riton, has been his closest friend and associate for 20 years; Ventura is a more recent acquaintance and runs a separate drugs gang. They cooperate until Ventura gets greedy.
The film’s denouement is a spectacular battle in the countryside outside Paris: Gabin loses his loot, but Ventura and his gang are killed before they can enjoy it. Riton dies, too, which seems to be by way of Gabin’s punishment, given the depth of their friendship.
The French censor allowed suggestions of sex, drugs and the depiction of extreme violence (these films could never have been made in Fifties Britain), but drew the line at crime being seen to pay.
The film establishes the glorious commonplaces of the French gangster film. The men are all impeccably dressed, in coach-built double-breasted suits and overcoats.
They have top-of-the range molls who work as nightclub dancers. Much of the action takes place in a Parisian restaurant where Gabin does all his business, thanks to the complicity of the patronne, with whom his relationship is unclear.
The Parisian cityscape and the French landscape form a backdrop to the action, and the men drive around in an array of bottle-aged French motors. There is enough smoking to kill half an arrondissement, the champagne comes in magnums and cognac flows freely. It is all utterly wonderful.
Gabin and Ventura appeared in a clutch of equally classy, atmospheric films during the Fifties that are a joy to watch today for the cinematography and the smell of old Paris, never mind for the plots and action of the films.
Ventura’s second film was Razzia sur la chnouf, in 1955, which dealt with a drugs gang in which Gabin appeared to be a major drug baron but was, in fact, an undercover policeman (“chnouf” is one of the French slang words for drugs, and “razzia” means a raid). In 1957, they starred as fellow gang members in Le rouge est mis, in which Gabin appeared to be a garagiste in Paris, but his business is a front for a serious criminal enterprise, and Ventura is a seriously unpleasant thug, a role he plays to perfection.
Ventura starred in one of the more explicitly violent and brutal gangster films of the era, Classe tous risques, in 1960, about the flight of a convicted murderer – he has been sentenced to death in absentia – from Italy to France, via Nice and Marseille to Paris.
Again, the location shooting is superb, though on its release the film was eclipsed by the rise of the French New Wave (one of whose ornaments, Jean-Paul Belmondo, appears in this film). It heavily influenced the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, whose Le doulos, Le deuxième souffle and Le Samoura? were the great gangster films of the Sixties, and its shadow lies over the two-part epic Mesrine, starring Vincent Cassel, released in 2008.
But perhaps the greatest French gangster film of all is Jules Dassin’s Rififi, starring Jean Servais, made in 1955 and telling the story of a gang who attempt an apparently impossible jewel robbery in the rue de Rivoli.
It contains a half-hour sequence without dialogue as the robbery is executed that must be seen to be believed. But all these films are fabulous: and all are on DVD, which makes one positively long for a really wet weekend.