In fact, in its day, Becker’s film was well-respected enough for Jean Gabin to be awarded the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival for his carefully contained and rueful performance as an aging hood out for one last heist to put him on easy street (he played virtually the same part again ten years later in Mélodie en Sous-Sol, with Alain Delon). These mid-’50s crime movies collectively garnered enough attention from the New Wave critics-turned-directors to inspire their first efforts in the hard-boiled genre: À bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959) and Tirez sur le pianiste (François Truffaut, 1960). Grisbi is notable for paving the way for two other great American-style heist films that were released in 1955: Bob le flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville) and Du Rififi chez les hommes (Jules Dassin). Cain, Cornell Woolrich and Jim Thompson were lionized by the French in ways they didn’t experience at home. American crime narratives (cinematic and fictional) struck a meaningful chord in the French after their traumatic experience of World War II, and writers like David Goodis, James M. Thus, the ‘poetic realism’ of such pre-war crime films as Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné, 1939) and La Bête humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938) gave way, in the late ’40s and early ’50s, to the série noire films like Quai des Orfèvres (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1947) and Touchez pas au Grisbi (Jacques Becker, 1953) that announced their American stylistic influences up-front. In terms of location, these films moved out of the working-class neighborhoods or provinces and started inhabiting the more glamorous parts of Paris. Crooks even started driving oversized imported American convertibles around Montmartre, refusing to keep a low profile. They were faster paced and more kinetic there was more overt violence, so the body counts got higher, and glossier women were more forcefully roughed up by thugs who dressed in sharper suits and hats than their 1930s counterparts. French crime films, after the self-consciously theoretical ‘invention’ of film noir by such key critics as Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier, as well as Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton (whose 1955 Panorama du Film Noir Américain was the very first book-length analysis of the mode), took on a harder, tougher edge. Touchez pas au Grisbi is a paramount example of cultural cross-fertilization between France and America. Source: ACMI/NLA Prod Co: Antara Produzione Cinematografia, Del Duca Films Prod: Robert Dorfmann Dir: Jacques Becker Scr: Jacques Becker, Maurice Griffe, Albert Simonin, based on Simonin’s book Phot: Pierre Montazel Ed: Marguerite Renoir Art Dir: Jean D’Eaubonne Mus: Jean WienerĬast: Jean Gabin, René Dary, Paul Frankeur, Lino Ventura, Jeanne Moreau, Dora Dollįilm noir was originally a French invention, a definitional concept or generic construct imposed on certain American films of the mid-1940s by post-war French critics beginning in 1946. Touchez pas au Grisbi (1953 France 94mins)
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