Intrigue & Charm

Night Train to Munich 1940 U.K. Twentieth Century Fox; remastered Criterion Collection DVD released in 2010 (90 minutes). Directed by Carol Reed; written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder; cinematography by Otto Kanturek; edited by R. E. Dearing.

Popular on both sides of the Atlantic in its day, Night Train to Munich, an early Carol Reed spy thriller, combines terrific writing, plotting and acting with romance and a circa-1940 bare-knuckle British lampoon of German Nazis.

Reed went on to direct The Fallen Idol (1948), The Third Man (1949), and Our Man in Havana (1959), notable among others. The writing team of Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder also wrote Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), a spy thriller-romantic comedy which also involves intrigue on a train in fascist Central Europe but has a lot more moving parts.

Both Night Train to Munich and The Lady Vanishes feature Margaret Lockwood as the leading lady and the comedy duo Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) as British public school Old Boys who comment on their surroundings for the ‘right-thinking sort’ and are befuddled by ‘foreigners’. Both films were edited by R. E. Dearing, but The Lady Vanishes is visually superior, with Hitchcock’s German expressionist-style montage and technical attention to sets, back projections and model-making.

Reed’s film opens with a static model of Berchtesgaden, Adolf Hitler’s alpine retreat. The action is set in the six months between the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and the September invasion of Poland which brought Great Britain into the war. An actor playing Hitler harangues a civilian official and slams his fist against the words ‘Austria’, ‘Sudetenland’ and

‘Prague’ on a succession of maps. These scenes blend with newsreel footage of Nazi armies advancing across Europe and a smiling Hitler. A high-pitched German harangue in the voice well-known to 1930s radio listeners comes from behind official high closed doors marked ‘AH’.

The scene switches to a high-tech Czech steel works. Metallurgist Axel Bomasch (James Harcourt) has invented a ‘revolutionary’ steel alloy for use in armor plate. The Nazis are approaching Prague. The company director, anxious to keep this technology out of German hands, provides Bomasch passports and airplane tickets to leave the country for England with his daughter Anna (Lockwood). Bomasch barely manages to board the last plane out; the Nazis nab Anna and put her in a concentration camp near Prague.

In the camp, Anna meets Karl Marsen (Paul Henreid), a thoughtful and attractive dissident schoolteacher who escapes with her to England. Henreid (billed here as von Hernried) at first wins Anna over playing a high-minded role, along the lines of his later famous Victor Laszlo in Casablanca (1942). But in this story his Marsen plays for the other side.

The concentration camp conveys a sense informed by experience; its oversized searchlights dramatize the atmosphere. The spy tradecraft also feels convincing, such as when a German operative meets his handler in a London doctor’s office. These details mean business in a way that makes it easier to suspend disbelief when a British operative turns up in a Nazi uniform at admiralty headquarters in Berlin and orders Germans around speaking with a German accent.  

Gus Bennett (Rex Harrison, in his first leading film role), a storefront boardwalk entertainer at a seaside resort in the south of England, helps Anna find her father. Bomasch is working with the British Admiralty on a project involving his steel alloy. But others are lurking. Before long, Bomasch and his daughter are on a U-boat back to Nazi Germany. Bennett, who turns out to be more than an entertainer who cannot sing, gets leave to rescue them.

Posing in Berlin as Major Ulrich Herzoff with a monocle that matches his accent and uniform, Bennett—later also identified by a chance British acquaintance (Charters) as ‘the Dicky Randall who played [cricket] for “The Gentlemen”’—must keep a step ahead of the Gestapo as he tries to spirit Bomasch and his daughter out of the country. This ‘spiriting out’ begins on a train to Munich the same September night Germany launches its invasion of Poland.

As in The Lady Vanishes, the protagonist is ably assisted on the train by the good offices of Charters and Caldicott. Charters grouses about leaving his custom golf clubs in Berlin, and he does not progress past ‘Hitler’s boyhood’ in the Mein Kampf he bought for the train ride because the Berlin newsstand did not offer Punch. But the lads recognize and rally to a good British chap in need of help, and find a practical application for Charters’ train reading.

The Nazis are focused on acquiring Bomasch’s alloy. Anna, already impressed that the talentless singer is actually a British naval intelligence officer, feigns a lack of romantic interest in him through flirtatious banter. Bennett has to get Anna and Bomasch across the Swiss border. And everyone has sport with the stereotypically dogged, regimented, authority-respecting, shouting Germans.

 

The Day of the MacGuffin

The Day of the Jackal 1973 UK/France (143 minutes) directed by Fred Zinnemann; screenplay by Kenneth Ross, based on Frederick Forsythe’s 1971 novel of the same title.

The Day of the Jackal is a taut political thriller in short declarative sentences.

This fast-paced 1973 Fred Zinnemann film derives from a bestselling thriller by British journalist Frederick Forsythe. It is shot in a semi-documentary style on location in Paris. It follows one of several plots by a right-wing French Army faction to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle in the early 1960s.

The army faction called itself the Organisation armée secrète (OAS). The OAS believed that de Gaulle, the national hero of the Second World War, had betrayed the army by ‘giving in’ to Algerian demands for independence after the country passed a referendum for self-determination in January 1961. Still sore from its loss in Vietnam, the army had been fighting a bitter counterinsurgency war in Algeria since 1954 to keep Algeria French. The OAS were serious, highly-trained professionals on a mission.

The point is not whether plot succeeds: de Gaulle died of old age in 1970. The drama centers on Police Inspector Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale), the Paris policeman tasked from on high to catch the assassin known by his codename ‘Chacal’ (Edward Fox), believed to be days away from an assassination attempt on the French president. The casting choices could not have been better. Lebel, aided by his assistant Caron (Derek Jacobi), is a gruff, down-to-earth city police detective, middle-aged and matter-of-fact in contrast to higher-level government officials—a French cop to the fingertips. Chacal, the French for ‘jackal’, supposedly a British ex-military contract killer, is all business, despite his slight build, ascots and breezy manner.

The casting, locations and seamless use of actual footage give this story a documentary-like feel, from the tall, distinguished elderly man (Adrien Cayla-Legrand) seen only at a distance, whose frame (de Gaulle was 6 feet, 5 inches, or 196cm tall) and large nose give him the famous de Gaulle profile, to the National Archives’ Hôtel Soubise standing in as the Élysée Palace, complete with a line of official black Citroën DSes. 

The opening scene reenacts a 1962 assassination attempt on de Gaulle. A team of ex-paratroopers led by Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry (Jean Sorel) tries to kill de Gaulle in a roadside ambush in the southwest Paris suburb of Le Petit-Clamart. Using automatic weapons, the team practically shoots the president’s profile in the rear of a black Citroën DS—140 shots fired in seven seconds, we are told—but miss both Le President and his wife. Bastien-Thiry was captured and executed.

The OAS then interviews and selects Charles Harold Calthrop (Fox), from their short list. We are told that Calthrop, ‘a commercial representative for a small armaments firm,’ successfully assassinated General Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, in 1961 (this happened but evidently was a local affair), as well as a political figure in the Congo (Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was murdered in the newly-independent Congo's Katanga Province in early 1961). Colonel Rodin (Eric Porter) agrees to pay Calthrop the $500,000 he demands to do the job: half in advance, half on fulfillment. Calthorp tells these men to refer to him as ‘Chacal’. He gives them a contact number through which to route messages.

 

 ‘I’d like to know how you expect us to find half a million dollars so quickly?’ asks one of the conspirators.

‘Use your network. Rob some banks,’ Calthrop replies.

We see Calthrop select the name ‘Paul Oliver Duggan’ from an infant’s grave in a rural English parish church graveyard. Calthrop takes this name to obtain a passport to travel to Genoa to set up the job by acquiring a specially-designed sniper’s rifle and more false documents, and then to scout the site in Paris. Calthrop also boosts the passport of a Danish man of his size and build at a British airport.

The MacGuffin—a spurious narrative detail which sidetracks the viewer’s attention rather than serve as the plot point it purports to be—is the detailed length to which Calthrop goes to hide his identity. He gives himself the codename ‘Chacal’ which, a British Foreign Office official later points out, combines the first three letters respectively of Charles and Calthrop. But he could be anyone. Apart from images on various identification documents, 'Chacal' is a cipher. He also is a polished professional, whether as Calthrop, Chacal, Duggan, ‘a fair-haired young foreigner with two suitcases,’ Per Lundquist the gay Danish schoolteacher, or André Martin the one-legged French war veteran.

We watch as Chacal leads Lebel on a chase across France shedding identities and leaving bodies. We know that Chacal does not kill de Gaulle. But we do not know whether this is because something happens to Chacal or his mission, or because Lebel foils the plot within the few days, hours, or even moments before one of de Gaulle’s three public appearances on Liberation Day on 25 August 1963.  

  

The Lady Vanishes

The Lady Vanishes 1938 U.K. (97 minutes) directed by Alfred Hitchcock; written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder; cinematography by Jack E. Cox; edited by R. E. Dearing; continuity by Alma Reville.

Alfred Hitchcock’s deftly-told The Lady Vanishes spins a serious spy thriller from a romantic comedy set in Bandrika, a fictional Central European country on the periphery of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The film is a gem, balancing Hitchcock’s sophisticated visual narrative sense with a comically-inspired Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder screenplay. Gilliat and Launder parody Britons abroad in an age when the sun never set on the British Empire. They get maximum effect from an ensemble of self-absorbed, spoiled Britons grousing about the locals and services in a “third rate” Balkan dictatorship.

Hitchcock’s hallmark as a director is his shots, and this is the best of his British films. What distinguishes his style from his British and American contemporaries is that he appears to have conceived of montage as a composition of shots in a manner closer to the early Germans and Russians—not simply editing, but constructing shots to tell a story in pictures. (He worked at UFA in Berlin briefly in the mid-1920s and was on the set with F.W. Murnau while he was shooting Der Letzte Mann—The Last Laugh.) Nor is this just an effect: this distinctive sensibility comes through just as strongly in his later Hollywood color films. 

In this story, an avalanche strands a group of international railway passengers overnight in a hotel in Bandrika. Their journey resumes the next morning. Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), an older Englishwoman returning to Britain after working six years in Bandrika as a governess, befriends Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), a wealthy young Englishwoman returning to London to be married. Miss Froy disappears on the train. Iris, suspecting foul play, enlists the help of the skeptical but attracted Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave, in his first leading role), a young Cambridge-educated Anglo-Irish musical ethnologist doing field research in Bandrika. The pair uncover an elaborate plot.

The story is set squarely in the political reality of the day. Nazi Germany was on the move. The film was released in August 1938, five months after Adolf Hitler annexed Austria and a month before Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” Munich Agreement attempted to appease Hitler by “trading” his annexation of the Czech Sudetenland for peace with Britain and France.

However, the film’s main plot is a romantic comedy between unlikes Iris and Gilbert. Gilliat and Launder gin up the comedy, using pairs to play on stereotypes of both Britons and “continentals”.

Iris’s friends Blanche (Googie Withers) and Julie (Sally Stewart) are privileged Englishwomen having fun in Bandrika, trying to talk Iris out of marrying what they call her “blue-blooded cheque chaser”.

Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) are “Cricket, man! Cricket!” public school old boys bent on getting back to England for a test match between England and Australia. Audiences enjoyed these two so much that Gilliat and Launder reprised the same actors in these roles in several other films.

Mr. Todhunter (Cecil Parker) is a London barrister nervous about appearances because he is on the shortlist for a judgeship; his “Mrs.” (Linden Travers) is given in quotes in the credits because the couple, each married to someone else, are having an affair. “Mrs.” chides Todhunter that his ardor has cooled since “Paris last autumn”, frequently piquing his hypocrisy and provoking pusillanimous evasions. “The law, like Caesar's wife, must be above all suspicion,” Todhunter instructs his mistress, to which she replies, “Even when the law spends six weeks with Caesar's wife?”

And the Hotel Manager (Emile Boreo) and Anna (Kathleen Tremaine), a maid, as well as other hotel staff, chirp happily in Bandrikan, a made-up local language that sounds vaguely Balkan Slavic but is nothing but impertinent babytalk to the impatient Britons. Boreo, who also slips in an “Oy vey iz mir”, was born in Poland in 1885 and had an American stage background.

And then there is the pleasant little old lady who, “following the footsteps” of her aged parents, drinks only Harriman’s Herbal Tea. Miss Froy is not self-absorbed. She is at home in her surroundings, loves the local music, speaks the language, and says that “spy” is “such a grim word”.

Miss Froy also is a foil for Charters and Caldicott, repeatedly and innocently putting them out. In the beginning, we see the two men struggle with a hotel door a cold gust blows open; once closed, the door opens again to introduce Miss Froy. Another time, Miss Froy interrupts Charters, engaged in using sugar cubes to illustrate an elaborate cricket play to Caldicott, to ask him for the sugar for tea.

At a meal with Charters and Caldicott between these incidents, Miss Froy responds to Charters’s grousing about Bandrika by saying: “Everyone sings here. The people are just like happy children, with laughter on their lips and music in their hearts.”

“It's not reflected in their politics, is it?” Charters says.

“I never think you should judge any country by its politics. After all, we English are quite honest by nature, aren't we?” Miss Froy sweetly replies. 

In tune with the politics of the day, the “bad guys” in this film either are Italian or speak with German accents: Signor Doppo (Philip Leaver), Dr. Egon Hartz (Paul Lukas), Baroness Athona (Mary Clare). They must prevent sensitive diplomatic information from leaving the country. They mean serious business.

But at long last the honest English pull together and win the day—minus one appeaser. Hitchcock passes in the crowd at Victoria Station. Iris eludes her “blue-blooded cheque chaser”. And the test match at Manchester was called due to rain.

Blue Is the Warmest Color

Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d'Adèle - Chapitres 1 et 2) 2013 France (180 minutes) directed and co-written by Abdellatif Kechiche; adapted from Julie Maroh’s comic book Le Bleu est une couleur chaude.

The theme of Blue Is the Warmest Color is appetite. The film is not about ‘coming of age’, or girlsex, or lesbians, or anything else we have seen in reviews. It is about appetite, feeding. And not just ‘feeding’, but stuffing one’s face: mouths are shot as though independent characters.

Critics pro and con have focused on the provocatively long and frankly pornographic scenes featuring rose-milk moist young female bodies co-luxuriating, sucking, frigging and spanking. These make for a tableau vivant but, like the magician’s white glove, are a sleight of hand that distract the eye from a passion to feed.

This film of overlong scenes begins with a father and daughter gorging themselves on spaghetti in front of a television. This is not upscale ‘pasta’ nor Italian-American mobsters slicing garlic with a razor to sleep with the squid or octopus in a handmade 'gravy'. The camera watches their mouths slurp forks-full of greasy spaghetti slathered with canned tomato sauce down to the last sucked-in strand. The daughter is Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), the story’s protagonist.

These eating scenes are really sex scenes. There is not the least suggestion that the unnamed father (Aurélien Recoing) ever had sex with his daughter, much less considered it. What they share is a deep, insatiable sensual appetite in the pits of their stomachs, a craving to feed. The unnamed mother (Catherine Salée) seems not to share this appetite. She recognizes it, perhaps reflexively: she pours herself more wine. It is notable also that Adèle later makes her father’s spaghetti recipe for her lover’s reception. The feeding mouths make this film subversive in the way Luis Buñuel’s films were subversive, though perhaps unintentionally.  

Eating meets sex when Adèle and her soon-to-be lover Emma (Léa Seydoux) picnic in a park. Adèle says: ‘I eat everything. I could eat nonstop all day. It’s scary, even when I’m full.’ Everything that is, but shellfish. Emma likes oysters. Adèle says the texture ‘grosses her out’. ‘That’s the best part,’ says Emma. They remind Adèle of ‘big snot balls’. ‘They remind me of something else,’ Emma says smiling. 

 

The lesbian theme assaults viewers like Buñuel’s terrorists bursting into a dining room and machine-gunning prosperous bourgeois dinner guests. The two main characters have lots of sex. But Adèle’s desire to ‘eat nonstop’, her longing to feed, is the point. ‘Le charme discret’ is the fat greedy hand reaching from under the table in the aftermath of the fusillade to grab one more chicken leg from an abandoned plate.

 

In any case, this is a fictional story about a young woman, not a documentary about lesbians or the lesbian community. Actually, a shorter, more impressionistic film would have worked better than this extended-scene epic. We found this story less convincing with more than one viewing.

The narrative is straightforward. Adèle is a high school student who lives in a Paris suburb with her working class parents. The sexual curiosity and inexperience of catty teenage female classmates produces incessant crude chatter and bluster about sex; Adèle clearly has options. She also is friends with Valentin (Sandor Funtek), an openly gay classmate better grounded than the other kids. 

Adèle’s classmates goad her into dating Thomas (Jérémie Laheurte). The teenage couple fumble around sexually: the boy knows what he wants and he gets it; Adèle feels what she needs but gets barely a taste of what her appetite craves. She dumps him. This is the end of Thomas’s world, for a day or two; Adèle embarks deeper into uncharted waters.

On her way to a date with Thomas, Adèle is haunted by a momentary glance she exchanges with a young woman with blue hair. ‘Love at first sight’ is among the topics discussed in her French literature class. Adèle later lets this woman find her in a lesbian bar where Adèle had guessed that she might see her. A relationship blooms between the inexperienced but hungry Adèle and Emma, a lesbian five or six years older. 

 

Emma, a fourth year painting student at the École des Beaux Arts, has been living two years with Lise (Mona Walravens). With Emma, Adèle at first experiences the explosion of the sensual pleasure she has hungered for in sex. They both do. We see a great deal more of this than is necessary to sustain the narrative. Emma leaves Lise and brings Adèle to her home. The second part of the film shows the two women living together pursuing separate careers: Adèle is a primary school teacher, Emma a painter.

But the younger, working class Adèle does not fit in with Emma’s lesbian friends; she is a lovely model, but unsophisticated to Emma’s art friends. Adèle’s sole friend and passion is Emma. She begins to feel less ‘loved’: her appetite is for Emma, not for playing the conventional roles of an artist’s model and wife, nor being a lesbian partner. Adèle feels isolated in a milieu that does not take her seriously or accept her—nor she it. Her point of view tells us that she is not a lesbian socially or culturally; likelier yet, she is not a lesbian at all.  

And for all Emma’s arty posing, she has a conventional heart. The blue rinses out of her hair; she has sown her wild oats and wants to settle down; she draws away from Adèle. Emma finds a pretext to break up, and returns to her domestic relationship with Lise who is raising small children.   

 

In the end, a bereft Adèle walks out of their lives and then out of the final shot in the warmest color, with that deep, insatiable sensual longing in the pit of her stomach.

Atmosphere & Attitude

Bob le Flambeur 1956 France; Rialto Pictures (102 minutes) written, directed and produced by Jean-Pierre Melville.
                The 1956 French heist movie Bob le Flambeur, a mood piece made by a French director who loved American gangster films, captures what even then was likely a Parisian nostalgia for the immediate postwar years.
                Bob le Flambeur occupies the same dreamspace as classics like Casablanca, Pépé le Moko and To Have and Have Not. Few people could inhabit such romantic improbabilities; but these stories’ nostalgia-scented magic has seduced generations of moviegoers into believing they might.

Told in black-and-white, these stories roam the city streets at night peering in the shadows, the neon signs and streetlights their silent witnesses. Writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob opens ‘in those moments between night and day, by the dawn’s early light’; the final curtain comes down at roughly the same hour. Most of the gambling happens afterhours in bars, clubs and restaurants with the chairs on the tables.

Yet for all its dark tones this picture is leavened with a wry nonchalance which would evoke a nostalgia for a time when there was honor among thieves. Melville’s characters are not as garrulous as Quentin Tarentino’s ‘Reservoir Dogs’, but similarly quip and banter beyond the confines of the narrative.

‘For anyone who lived in the postwar period, nothing can compare to those days,’ said Daniel Cauchy, one of the film’s co-stars, interviewed in 2002. Cauchy said that he was living on Place Pigalle, where much of the story transpires, during the two years that Melville shot the film. In Cauchy’s view, in the period that followed five years of war and the German occupation of Paris, ‘things in the city were easier, people were light-hearted, and those who had money paid for those who did not’.

In the opening sequence, a narrator—Melville—tells us that Montmartre, the center of the action, is both heaven, with a shot of the Sacré-Cœur basilica which crowns the hill, and hell, showing a tram slowly descending to the bottom and then signage on Place Pigalle, best known for its ‘boldest-nudes-in-the-world’ girlie shows and sex workers.

The heist, conceived after the story is underway, is the straightforward stick-up of a seaside gambling casino in Deauville, Normandy. After accounting for the technical details, the outcome rides on the elements of timing, surprise—and Lady Luck. 

The film’s main characters are: Robert ‘Bob le Flambeur’ Montagné (Roger Duchesne), a charismatic reformed career thief with a gambling problem, his associate Roger (André Garet), his protégé Paulo (Cauchy) and Yvonne (Simone Paris), the proprietress of the Pile ou Face (Heads or Tails) Bar, Bob’s hangout; Lieutenant Ledru (Guy Decomble), a sympathetic police commissioner; young hoods, pimps and prostitutes of Paris’s Quartier Pigalle on the make; and Anne (Isabelle Corey), a teenager ambitious to become a part of this scene.

More than just a gambler, a ‘flambeur’ is a person in thrall to his passion for gambling—a gambling addict.

Bob, a compulsive gambler, is known by his associates ‘to win big, but lose bigger’. We see him drag the loyal Roger to the track with hot tip on a harness race, and then see a smiling Bob collect his winnings at the window. Yet just as quickly he is cleaned out at the card table. 

And he lives with style. Everyone in Quartier Pigalle (and at police headquarters at 36, Quai des Orfèvres) knows and respects ‘Monsieur Bob’. He has a duplex apartment on Avenue Junot with a picture window centered on the Sacré-Cœur; he has paintings, art objects and old books. He has a foreign slot machine in a closet and drives a new American convertible. But luck is not a lady with Bob.

Nor is Anne, the teenager he tries to prevent ‘sidewalk Romeos’ from making a ‘pavement princess’, though she wants dearly to be. Bob first notices the tall, well-built woman early one morning on Place Pigalle as she buys chips and then climbs on a motorcycle behind an American sailor. He then meets her in the Pile ou Face after chasing off Marc (Gérard Buhr), a sidewalk Romeo.

The story is that Melville first spotted the same ‘toute jeune fille trés avancée pour son âge’ on the street and picked her up in his car as Bob does in the movie. It turned out that Corey was a model not yet 16 years old. This pretty teenager is not a conventional Hollywood starlet, and had no screen-acting experience, but her sexuality is striking—equally for a film director, a collector of precious objects, a Pigalle wolf, and a moviegoer—and makes her a key piece in this nostalgic dreamspace.

Cauchy said in his 2002 interview that mobsters were drawn to actors and directors, not because they were star-struck, but because the roles the actors played corresponded to the mobsters’ everyday lives. This had the effect of blurring fiction and reality, he said. Cauchy added that in the 1950s, he and other movie people socialized, gambled and went to the track with mobsters, and that these elements worked their way into movies.

Cauchy also noted that Melville may have been the first film director to show people shot falling backward rather than forward.

He said that he had ‘died’ in several gangster movies clutching his stomach and falling forward as he had seen actors like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart do in American movies. But Melville wanted him just once to ‘throw himself backward’—and used that shot. ‘I think he heard about this from someone who was shot during the war,’ Cauchy said. 

When Bob complains to Ledru that ‘the mob is not what it used to be’, Cauchy said, he is referring to how the war changed the Paris underworld. During the war, half the professional criminals had collaborated with the Germans as associates of the Bonny-Lafont Gang and the French Gestapo; the other half, including the Guerini brothers [the Corsican mob] fought for the Resistance, he said.

French law enforcement under the Nazis blurred the differences between cops and robbers. The Germans retained French locals with questionable backgrounds to enforce the law, and insiders made a killing on the black market though many did not survive the peace. After the war, the Corsicans, which controlled heroin trafficking through Marseilles, constituted what became known in the 1950s and 1960s as the French Connection.

At the casino’s chemin de fer table on the night of the heist, Bob wins big as never before. But Lt. Ledru has been tipped off. Two pairs of low-slung black Traction Citroëns, those of the gang and those of the police, converge on the casino entrance at the appointed hour at daybreak.

Maybe for once Bob will not lose bigger than he wins.

Among several remakes and homages to this film are Oceans 11 (1960 and 2001), Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1996 Hard Eight, and Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief, made in 2003 with Nick Nolte as Bob Montagnet. Jordan’s film, set in Nice, updated the original characters, adopted much of the dialogue and added an intriguing plot wrinkle.

In addition to a high definition digital transfer of the original print, the Criterion Collection DVD released in 2003 includes the above-quoted 2002 interview with Cauchy, who also starred in Melville’s Quand Tu Liras Cette Lettre (1953) and Jacques Becker’s 1954 Touchez pas au Grisbi, among other films.