A fine supporting cast includes a young Lino Ventura and an even younger Jeanne Moreau. And this film takes as much pleasure in watching Gabin open a bottle of wine as it does observing him in action. If its code of honour and its world of safe houses (and the absence of any police) make it seem like a wartime resistance film, it does also show what other gangster movies often ignore: that the reason for earning money dishonestly is to be able to live in style. Becker’s film, full of neat angles and delightful little bits of business, is laconic and admirably methodical. Instead he finds himself in a world of moody double-crosses. An ageing and weary Gabin attempts to retire after one last robbery. “This model French gangster picture set the rules for the great sequence of underworld movies from Jean-Pierre Melville that followed. But it’s Gabin’s show all the way, anticipating the melancholy, atmospheric gangster pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville that started to appear a couple years later.” Jeanne Moreau, in one of her first parts, plays a showgirl who two-times Gabin’s similarly aging partner (Rene Dary), and future star Lino Ventura also puts in an appearance. “Jean Gabin wasn’t yet 50 when he starred as a big-time, high-style gangster hoping to retire, but he still looks pretty wasted, and this pungent tale about aging and friendship, adapted from a best-selling noir thriller by Albert Simonin, would be hard to imagine without his puffy features. He is the original, so there is no need to look for inspiration.” But the great French noirs of the 1950s are not copies of Hollywood instead, they have a particularly French flavor in Touchez Pas au Grisbi, the critic Terence Rafferty writes, ‘real men eat pate,’ and this is ‘among the very few French movies about the criminal class in which neither the characters nor the filmmakers are afflicted by the delusion that they are Americans.’ A few years later, in Godard’s Breathless (1960), Belmondo would be deliberately channeling Bogart, but here Gabin is channeling only himself. “The world of French crime films is a particular place, informed by the French love for Hollywood film noir, a genre they identified and named. Touchez Pas au Grisbi - watch online: streaming, buy or rent You can buy 'Touchez Pas au Grisbi' on Apple TV as download or rent it on Apple TV online. But when moll Jeanne Moreau spills the beans to bad guy Lino Ventura (in his debut), it’s time for a showdown. Jacques Becker’s 1954 heist thriller Touchez pas au grisbi was the comeback he needed, and it propelled him into a successful second act, which lasted until his death in 1976.(1954, Jacques Becker) Over-the-hill gangster Gabin has just pulled the heist of a lifetime: enough grisbi (loot) for a cushy retirement. Following a brief, less successful stint in Hollywood and a period of fighting with the Allies in North Africa during World War II, Gabin saw his film career slow down, and he appeared mostly in supporting roles for a while (including in Ophuls’s Le plaisir). ” Soon after Pépé, Renoir’s antiwar masterpiece Grand Illusion hit, and it was an even bigger smash, cementing Gabin’s superstar status in this and all of his most successful roles ( La bête humaine, Le jour se lève), Gabin played some form of working-class social outcast, and he always provided audiences with a strong point of identification. As Michael Atkinson has written for Criterion, “Without its iconic precedent, there would have been no Humphrey Bogart, no John Garfield, no Robert Mitchum, no Randolph Scott, no Jean-Paul Belmondo (or Breathless or Pierrot le fou), no Jean-Pierre Melville or Alain Delon, no Steve McQueen. His work with director Julien Duvivier would prove his most important: they collaborated on two successful films in the midthirties ( Maria Chapdelaine and La bandera), but it was their third, Pépé le moko, that, in creating the romantic criminal antihero archetype, shot Gabin into the stratosphere. This led to roles in silent films, but it was with the advent of sound that Gabin found his true calling-even if his quiet stoicism was what he would become best known for. He eventually followed in his family’s footsteps, though, appearing onstage at various Paris music halls and theaters, including the Moulin Rouge. Though his parents were cabaret performers, Gabin-born Jean-Alexis Moncorgé in 1904-put off show business at first, working instead as a laborer for a construction company. With his penetrating gaze, quiet strength, and unshakeable everyman persona, Jean Gabin was the most popular French matinee idol of the prewar period, and remains one of the great icons of cinema.
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