Claude Sautet (1960)
In its early stages, Classe tous risques promises to be a fast-paced, character-driven crime thriller. It delivers on that promise but the effect is oddly unsatisfying. My reaction may reflect a lack of sympathy with thieves’ honour stories, in which a professional criminal’s adherence to a code of behaviour seems meant to illustrate a dogged, doomed gallantry – in spite of his (it is nearly always a man, of course) disregard for other people’s lives and property along the way. I knew nothing about the movie other than who the director was and from the trailer shown at BFI, which made me want to see it. Now that I’ve found out a little more, I wonder if viewers aware of its real-life background read this onto Classe tous risques – in a way that enlarges and deepens the film beyond what it actually is. The protagonist Abel Davos is based on a real criminal (of the same name, except for one letter – ‘Danos’ instead of ‘Davos’). The author of the source novel Classe tous risques was José Giovanni (he co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Claude Sautet and Pascal Jardin). Giovanni was himself a former criminal, at one time a next-door-neighbour of Abel Danos in jail. His first novel, Le trou, an autobiographical account of an attempted prison break, was published partly thanks to the support of Albert Camus.
At one point in Classe tous risques, Abel (Lino Ventura) warns a copain that if you compromise (I think the word he uses is ‘slide’), you’re nothing. By the end of the film Abel’s cussed commitment to resisting capture and to settling scores with disloyal members of his circle has resulted in the loss, in different ways, of all those who matter most to him. A shoot-out with customs officers on a Menton beach has brought about the death of his loving wife, Thérèse (Simone France), and his long-time partner in crime, Raymond (Stan Krol). (It’s Raymond’s corpse that Abel goes to and holds in his arms first – perhaps this is significant or perhaps Abel didn’t see Thérèse go down.) An old flame, the wife (Michèle Méritz) of another associate, dies from a melodramatically timed heart attack. For their own sake as well as his own, Abel is separated from his two young sons, Pierrot (Robert Desnoux) and Daniel (Thierry Lavoye), and from Eric Stark (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a younger voleur who helps Abel keep hidden from the law, and with whom he develops a friendship. Eric is shot in the leg by the police when, in search of Abel, they arrive at his apartment. Eric is last seen, with his adoring girl Liliane (Sandra Milo), recovering in a prison hospital. A voiceover narrator informs us, as Abel disappears from view on a busy Paris street, that a few days later he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death and executed. (This sequence also features a small, elderly woman, who walks badly. I don’t know if she’s a brilliantly cast extra or an accidental passer-by but she magnetises the camera.) The consequences of Abel’s way of life are sometimes passed over by Claude Sautet – for example, the shocking trauma for his two boys of not just losing their mother but seeing her shot dead. And the effect on the protagonist’s frame of mind of his actions is delayed until the very end – there’s little sense of accumulating doubt and a draining away of self-belief. What is Abel trying to achieve? Is he a man determined to assert and stay true to his own identity even if this quest is bound to end in failure? The answers to these questions are not clear in the film itself. It’s the Camus connection, via José Giovanni, that lends the proceedings, in retrospect, a bit of existential substance.
Lino Ventura, rock-hard but melancholy, gives a fine performance in the lead. The physical contrasts between Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo as Eric, and what these signify, are the best thing in Classe tous risques. While Ventura’s face is gravely immobile, Belmondo’s will break into, and be transformed by, his big grin. The two actors’ physiques and the quality of their movement express how Abel’s options are closed off whereas there are possibilities for Eric. Belmondo does amazing things: driving in a car, he’s silent and apparently expressionless but he communicates Eric’s feelings of respect for and protectiveness towards Abel. Belmondo’s amiable dynamism also gives his character a real unpredictability. While fully loyal to Abel, Eric in his hospital bed assures Liliane he’ll be back on his feet in a few weeks and won’t get that long a sentence for harbouring a fugitive. This cheerful crook is both hopeful and disturbing. (Eric also seems more real than Abel, in that he’s not expected to mean something in the way that Abel is.) The film is generally well acted. The cast includes Marcel Dalio as a seedy fence, Evelyne Ker as his bolshy stepdaughter, Michel Ardan and Claude Cerval as fairweather criminal friends, and France Asselin as the former’s wife. Particularly striking are Robert Desnoux as the permanently stunned-looking elder son; Charles Blavette (Renoir’s Toni in the 1930s) as a man who gives Abel a roof over his head before Eric does; the vivid Sandra Milo as Liliane; and Betty Schneider as a young woman in Eric’s block who takes a tentative shine to Abel.
From the very start Georges Delerue’s score has an edgy wit and melody which lifts the story. And the changing tempo of the film is a real strength – the nervous stasis of the opening sequences in Milan station give way to Abel’s and Raymond’s escape from the scene of their crime there, and their sense of exhilaration at being on the run. Later on, the pressure of the cramped interiors in which Abel increasingly finds himself is no less expressive. Photographed by Ghislain Cloquet, Classe tous risques is impressive in many ways but less than the sum of its parts. In his Sight and Sound piece, which the BFI used as the programme note, Nick James argues that Sautet’s ‘magnificent’ film got overlooked in 1960 because of the ‘fuss’ about the New Wave but it can’t hold a candle, either as a Hollywood-inspired crime story or as an existential character study, to Breathless. (It arrived in Paris cinemas in the same month as Godard’s film.) The presence of Belmondo, marvellous as he is in this movie too, is a persistent reminder of that.
19 September 2013
