271 Touchez pas au grisbi

[wendersfan]

Touchez pas au grisbi



Jean Gabin is at his most wearily romantic as aging gangster Max le Menteur in the Jacques Becker gem Touchez pas au grisbi (Hands Off the Loot!). Having pulled off the heist of a lifetime, Max looks forward to spending his remaining days relaxing with his beautiful young girlfriend. But when Riton (René Dary), Max's hapless partner and best friend, lets word of the loot slip to loose-lipped, two-timing Josy (Jeanne Moreau), Max is reluctantly drawn back into the underworld. A touchstone of the gangster-film genre, Touchez pas au grisbi is also pure Becker—understated, elegant, evocative.

Special Features

- New, restored high-definition digital transfer
- 2002 video interview with actor Daniel Cauchy
- Excerpt from an episode of the French television series Cineastes de notre temps dedicated to Jacques Becker, featuring screenwriter Maurice Griffe, Grisbi author Albert Simonin, actor Lino Ventura, and François Truffaut
- 1972 interview excerpt with Lino Ventura
- Clip from a 1978 interview with composer Jean Wiener
- Theatrical trailer
- New and improved English subtitle translation

Criterionforum.org user rating averages

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[Martha]

I saw this earlier in the year at the Wexner Center, on a double bill with, of all things, Au hazard, Balthazar. It's really a lovely little film, but of course Jean Gabin just overwhelms it - he has so much screen presence it's amazing.

I've never seen this, but the description of Gabin as "at his most wearily romantic" has me buying the disc blind. I can't think of a better description for what is best about him as a presence and an actor.

[BWilson]

I saw the Rialto rerelease and didn't really care for it. I liked it less than Bob le Flambeur and Riffifi, so if you didn't care for those you probably won't like this. I did like those films and still found Grisbi rather booring.

[Narshty]

I've just rented the StudioCanal French disc, and while it was a stunning transfer, the film is, alas, very dull. It adds further weight to John Ford's credo that a film is at its best when it's long on action and short on dialogue. All everyone does in this film is talk. Chatter, chatter, chatter, all the bloody day. It was like Rififi-meets-my mum.

"Understated, elegant, evocative", says Criterion. "Elegant", probably (Ryvita and pate have swiftly gone on my shopping list), but "swanky" might be a better word for it (those flash gits). "Understated" is just a kind way of saying fuck all worth caring about happens, and the only thing of which it is "evocative" is other, better gangster films. A pity.

[kieslowski]

Off topic, slightly - just out of curiosity, Narshty, where did you rent it from? I'm in the UK and would love to be able to rent non-UK discs...

[What A Disgrace]

The back cover art is up at CriterionDVD.com.

Added to the supplements is another excerpt from the episode of Cinéastes de notre temps dedicated to Becker.

[Gordon]

Yeah, I'm in the UK and I'd love to rent this film before buying the Criterion. A link would be much appreciated.

The only Becker film I have seen is Le Trou via the Criterion disc, which is probably the best bare-boned Criterion I own. I think it's a great film; the atmosphere and pacing feel totally unique. The verisimilitude of the detailed breakout is spellbinding.

I have been waiting for years and years and years to see Casque d'Or and the extras sound interesting and will make up for the lack of supplements on Le Trou, so I'll buy it blind, but I'm on the fence over Grisbi.

[Narshty]

Well, it's a specialist film shop in north London.

[zedz]

NY Times review of the two new Beckers:

Two by Jacques Becker

Jacques Becker's 1952 masterpiece "Casque d'Or" opens with an unforgettably frank image of desire. As her petty hoodlum boyfriend whirls her around an open air music hall in the France of 1914, Simone Signoret's eyes keep snapping back to the handsome young carpenter (Serge Reggiani) who stands on the sidelines, his eyes fixed on her in return. The passion that travels from Signoret's penetrating look seems to burst through the screen and challenge the spectator in his seat. Will Reggiani, and the viewer with him, be courageous enough to answer this call despite the dangers it will surely invite?

Becker died in 1960 at 53 after completing only 13 feature films. But that work was substantial enough to earn him an honored position with the critics-turned-directors of the New Wave, who found little enough to admire in the classical French cinema. Temperamentally, Becker was hardly an iconoclast like Truffaut or Godard: he constructed his films with meticulousness and circumspection rather than roaring off in transports of New Wave romantic revolt. But in his best films Becker's bit-by-bit building-block aesthetic broke through to the other side, where the accumulation of detail poured out in a torrent that very much resembled life as it was lived in 1950's France.

Today, our invaluable friends at the Criterion Collection are releasing two of Becker's finest films - "Casque d'Or" and the 1954 gangster tale, "Touchez Pas au Grisbi" (a slang phrase that translates as "hands off the loot"). As hard as it is to believe now, "Casque d'Or" - a film driven by Signoret's most iconographic performance as a high-class prostitute, whose abundant blond hair has earned her the nickname "casque d'or," or "golden helmet" - was a dismal commercial failure on its first release, and has only gradually crept back onto the list of French classics.

"Grisbi," by contrast, was a tremendous popular success and helped to restart the fading postwar career of Jean Gabin by casting him as a world-weary underworld denizen - a role he would repeat, both as cop and criminal, into the last years of his life.

In "Grisbi" Gabin plays Max-le-Menteur ("Lying Max"), an elder statesman of Pigalle who, as the film opens, has stolen eight gold bars from a depot at Orly. A rival gang, led by Lino Ventura (another mythic presence in French gangster films, here making his film debut), decides to kidnap Max's fallible partner, Riton (René Dary) and torture him into revealing the hiding place of the bullion. But they haven't reckoned on the bonds of friendship that bind the two men, nor on the reserves of cruelty and cold resolve that Max is willing to tap to get his friend back.

Within two perfectly linear screenplays - event leads to event with no time for dramatic digressions or character asides - Becker constructs two vivid worlds filled with three-dimensional personalities in constant, vital movement. The detail work disappears into a seamless narrative, yielding that rarest sensation in movies - the sense of spontaneously unfolding experience. ($39.95).

[Tribe]

Narshty, the story is kind of thin. But this is a little gem, imho, where mood and the evocation of an era carry the movie. A pure exercise in style. I found all the stylistic nuances fascinating: Gabin's great suits, eating pate at 2:00 AM, the hot hot hot looking French women, the pursuit of middle-class luxuries without the viciousness of contemporary depictions of criminal life. Becker does have a tendency to add silly shots (I mean, why add a shot of the taxi cab driver's foot stepping on and easing off the gass pedal?), but the whole of the movie makes up for it.

Tribe

[ben d banana]

yeah, i'm definitely w/ tribe on this one. the lifestyle interfering w/ mundane existence and desires was perfect... and those French ladies.

however

It was like Rififi-meets-my mum.

nails the essence of mediocrity.

[Narshty]

How the fuck could I have been so embarrassingly, entirely wrong about a film? It's simply sublime. The tone of the storytelling is utterly hypnotic, yet one never feels led anywhere for a moment. I've never seen direction and story construction like it, ever - it never feels improvised or uncertain in any way, yet while you're watching it doesn't feel as if the next scene has even been written yet. It radiates with a kind of casual suaveness, full of gorgeous little details about these men's lives, going through every little process of their profession, and yet they're allowed to remain absolutely real people at all times.

It is a masterpiece. I am a twat. 'Nuff said.

[BWilson]

How can someone's opinion on a film change so much in 45 days? I still agree with your first assessment. I think Grisbi is rather dull and no where near its contemporaries (like Flambeur).

[Tribe]

I wonder if Narshty's pulling our legs....

Tribe

[Narshty]

I assure you, I'm pulling no-one's leg. Indeed, both opinions were written with the utmost sincerity, but only the latter is correct. The style is, in many ways, minimalist, but I still find it riveting. It's just such beautifully observed human behaviour, to the point that Becker actually uses it to distract us from the plot. I do think there's a real profundity and poetry (and wry humour) at work in the film in the way it so accurately portrays tender but poker-faced masculine interaction and relationships. I find it utterly charming now. When I wrote the original "review", I was all noired out, after disappointments with The Asphalt Jungle, Out of the Past, Bob le Flambeur and others. I simply focused on the mechanics of the plot, which is almost certainly is the least of Touchez's pleasures.

[Tribe]

I don't pretend to speak French, but at times I can follow a bit of it particularly if the dialogue in a film is fairly "formal." In this one, I couldn't follow it at all...I understand that there is some slang in this dialogue, but is it that heavily laden with French slang? And if so, how does it rate in terms of "authenticity" to the French speakers out there?

Tribe

[Arn777]

Yep it's full of old-shool French slang and sounds 100% authentic, maybe a bit strange for today's teenagers, but for French people over 30 (like me) it sounds authentic, albeit old-fashion (grisbi is not used so much anymore), which makes the film in fact quite funny. I bet audiences must have a been a bit surprised when it came out, as it contains a lot of what must have been then street-talk, and I think not many films of that time used so much slang.

[Nihonophile]

I had a feeling this was going on, I particularly loved Gabin saying Grisbi.

I agree with Narshty, the plot was the least of my concerns when I was watching this. I hope Casque D'or is just as absorbing and subtle.

[Max von Mayerling]

I have not yet seen Grisbi, but I ordered it after watching my copy of Casque. My reaction to Casque was consistent with Narshty's comments about Grisbi. "It's just such beautifully observed human behaviour" captures Casque as well, in my opinion. The film has a very spontaneous but not improvised feel. Recognizing this is the Grisbi board & not the Casque board, I'll say no more. See my (brief) comment on the Casque board.

[Napier]

Just curious,but does anyone know the name of the actress who plays the fence's either daughter or niece?What a classic babe!

[Tribe]

does anyone know the name of the actress who plays the fence's either daughter or niece?What a classic babe!

I don't know who she is, but this movie is just crawling with hot looking babes. By the same token, the women in this don't come off as being terribly bright, sort of Jessica Rabbit clones without the wittiness. But still what a bunch of hot women!

Tribe

[Napier]

Thank's for the feedback Tribe,I agree Touchez pas au Grisbi is full of great looking women.Makes me want to go to France!!But I have a sneaking suspicion that those are discontinued models!Just like the film itself,They don't make em' like they used to.By the way,to answer my own question,the actresses name is Delia Scala!

[Tribe]

But I have a sneaking suspicion that those are discontinued models!Just like the film itself,They don't make em' like they used to.

I'm not sure that any director could get away with depicting women as overtly idiotic today as Becker does here.

Tribe

[GringoTex]

I just watched this for the first time. The French New Wave owes Becker an apology. Everything they did to narrative, they stole from him, which is fine, but they never fessed up. As far as I can tell, Truffaut is the only one to ever aknowledge the debt. There's a barely a mention of Becker in the Cahiers du Cinema compilations.

And Becker is so much better than Mellville, it's hard to understand the latter's pantheon standing. I guess it was the cowboy hat.

[Arn777]

Maybe not in the compilations, but Cahiers did a couple of long interviews with Becker in the 50s and always had long reviews of his films and defended a couple of them that were panned by the other critics.