Claude Sautet's "Classe Tous Risques" - French noir

[HollywoodGolightly]

Claude Sautet's Classe tous risques (1960) is one of the best foreign-language noirs I've seen recently.

 

If the French were the ones who originally heaped praise on the noir genre, then this would seem like an appropriate homage to the genre. The story is pretty bleak all the way, in spite of a little bit of levity here and there - mostly thanks to the very young Jean-Paul Belmondo, here in one of his first roles after Godard's Breathless.

 

The movie starts off with a heist gone slightly wrong, and how it all goes downhill from there for the aging gangster Abel Davos (Lino Ventura). Without giving too much away, one could say that Davos learns while on the run who his friends really are.

 

Thanks to Criterion, the movie is relatively easy to find on DVD, and it looks great.