Slideshow
BAND OF OUTSIDERS
France, 1964
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard
Starring Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur
In French with English subtitles.
Approx. 97 min. DCP and 35mm.
In the dreary Parisian suburb of Joinville, Claude Brasseur and
Sami Frey (“Belmondo’s suburban cousins” – JLG) take turns romancing
English language student Anna Karina, then light up when she mentions
the big pile of cash stashed at her aunt’s villa. A piece of cake burglary,
but then things go memorably awry. A jeu d’esprit—extracted from one of
the blackest of Série Noire novels, Fools’ Gold by Dolores Hitchens—with
echt Godardian set pieces including the trio line-dancing “Le Madison”
and then “doing” the Louvre in record time.
Presented with support from The George Fasel Memorial Fund for Classic French Cinema and The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film
Reviews
“A reverie of a gangster movie... It’s as if a French poet took a banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines; Godard re-creates the gangsters and the moll with his world of associations—and seeing them as people in a Paris cafe, mixing them with Rimbaud, Kafka, Alice in Wonderland.”
– Pauline Kael
“Words are not up to capturing its elfin charm, not even up to hinting how beautiful Paris looked in Raoul Coutard’s unconsciously romantic photography. Although Godard talked a lot about his theories and his methods, if he had a secret, it was a gift for creating irresistible images. BAND OF OUTSIDERS shows him at his most amusing, and that is no small thing.”
– Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
“A LUSTROUS RESTORATION! MASTERPIECE! [Godard]’s most charming and, arguably, influential film: a free-associative meditation on the gangster genre that revealed a new way of framing our dreams and our reality. There would be no BONNIE AND CLYDE without it.”
– David Edelstein, New York Magazine