“TOUGH AND TOUCHING!
A MASTERPIECE OF THE FRENCH GANGSTER GENRE!”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times
Click here for full review  Click here to see Scott's online "Movie Minute" segment

“ONE OF THE BEST FRENCH GANGSTER FILMS...
tense and warm, elliptical and human.”
– Betrand Tavernier. Click here to read entire paragraph.

“A stunning gangster flick!
The great discovery of 2005!”
– New York magazine. Click here for full review

“A FIRST-RATE CRIME THRILLER!”
– Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor

[FOUR STARS]
A BURIED TREASURE! THE MOST SOULFUL AND SYMPATHETIC OF CRIME DRAMAS! Belmondo’s got so much jaunty charisma, the screen can barely contain him!”
 – Jan Stuart, Newsday

“You couldn’t ask for a more humanistic example of genre storytelling, especially after the shark-like momentum of the first 30 minutes cools down and the film’s criminal fraternity gets fleshed out in earnest. Those who love Euro-stars should consider it required viewing. Ventura’s mug has never been more suited for a part and Belmondo, still months away from becoming an icon via Breathless, radiates a supernova charisma. Whenever the two actors share the screen, [it] suddenly turns into he most hard-boiled buddy movie you’ve ever seen.”
– David Fear, Time Out New York

[FOUR STARS]
Claude Sautet’s tense, gritty, documentary-textured 1960 Classe Tous Risques is so good, so spare, so unerring in every gesture that it makes you wish he had kept making noir-tinged gangster movies as perfect as this one. It combines fatalism, economy, freshness and wonderful little explosive surprises as it traces the downfall of a French bank robber one the run. This film slipped through the fingers of American audiences its first time around. Don't miss it this time!”
– Jay Carr, AM New York

(1960) Neo-realism meets film noir as, on crowded Milan streets, with the Duomo looming in the background, two hommes durs execute a split second slug and grab payroll heist — in broad daylight — then begin a lightning-paced getaway, via underground passages, car, motorcycle, bus (!), speedboat, and ambulance. But after all, when a tough guy is going back to France (where he’s been sentenced to death in absentia) after holing up in Italy for nearly a decade, he’s got to have some startup money — particularly if he’s going back with his wife and kids! And as the mayhem mounts, one gangster, in a stricken voice, reflects on the cost to others of his “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” life style, seemingly flirting with a realization that there’s a viable life beyond the milieu.

Bridging argot-rich 50s masterworks like Rififi and Touchez-pas au Grisbi with Jean-Pierre Melville’s pared-down thrillers of the 60s, Classe Tous Risques (the title refers to a type of insurance policy, à la Double Indemnity, but is also a pun on “tourist class”) is a penetrating study of the underworld tough guy at the end of his rope, drawn from screenwriter José Giovanni’s first-hand knowledge of the post-war French underworld. Directed with an acute feeling for characterization, this was the first major feature by Sautet (who at decade’s end would abandon noir altogether for complex relationship films like César and Rosalie and Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud) and the first teaming of two great French cinema icons: former champion wrestler-turned-scene-stealing crime film second banana Lino Ventura (Grisbi, Elevator to the Gallows), here making a career-decisive move into lead roles, and New Wave wunderkind Jean-Paul Belmondo, coming to Risques straight from Breathless (watch those legendary lips wrap themselves around his character’s très Americain name “Eric Stark”); the duo’s cross-generational bonding gives Classe its climactic poignancy (Melville, who championed the film, wrote that the characters’ friendship rang much truer than the trendier Jules and Jim’s). But despite a “Who’s Who” crew and cast — including composer Georges Delerue (Contempt), cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet (Au Hasard Balthazar, Mouchette) and co-stars Sandra Milo (8 1/2) and Marcel Dalio (Grand Illusion, Casablanca) — Classe Tous Risques got lost in the shuffle of the New Wave. In Europe and elsewhere its reputation has grown steadily over the past 45 years (John Woo names it one of his favorite noirs), but in this country, a dubbed version called The Big Risk came and went in drive-ins and grindhouses, so obscurely it didn’t even rate a Times review. Here, at last, is the original French version, with a new translation by Lenny Borger.
A RIALTO PICTURES RELEASE

Return to FRENCH CRIME WAVE Series Page

Links:

• View the trailer
• CAST & CREDITS
• BERTRAND TAVERNIER & JOHN WOO ON CLASSE TOUS RISQUES
• JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE ON CLASSE TOUS RISQUES
• CLAUDE SAUTET ON CLASSE TOUS RISQUES
• BIOGRAPHIES OF CLAUDE SAUTET, LINO VENTURA, JEAN-PAUL BELMONDO, ET AL.