counterpart of pacing, action, and movement.” They had it right: on repeated viewings, it becomes clear just how radical Touchez pas au grisbi is in its narrative fragmentation.Īs in Becker’s final masterpiece, Le Trou, everything here is about time. When Variety reviewed the movie after its Paris opening, it had high praise for Becker’s “fine job” but was careful to note that the movie was “not of sufficient suspense and entertainment value for more general situations. New characters emerge without explanation, and past entanglements are never clarified. Grisbi unfolds as a series of tableaus so vivid we scarcely notice how insignificant the story is: each scene has its own reality, its own fascination. The scenes of confrontation are treated as tedious interruptions-a matter of going to work-in what would otherwise be a comfortable life of leisure, whether passed in Madame Bouche’s restaurant (where the only problem is shooing away the squares who sometimes wander in) or in the bedroom of a bejeweled American who “really doesn’t know” who and what Max is. The heist on which the plot depends isn’t shown, isn’t even explained. Becker’s genius in Touchez pas au grisbi is to focus resolutely on what comes before or after or falls in between the decisive actions: it’s a film where we learn how gangsters brush their teeth. Plot, finally, which abounds in Simonin’s novel, here becomes-at least until the final violent explosion-a chain of suggestive pauses. As for humor, it is everywhere and nowhere, a hard-bitten humor that seasons every conversation without ever suggesting anything like relaxed enjoyment. Exaggerated speech becomes a series of laconic exchanges, with the previously garrulous Max-Simonin’s endlessly talkative narrator-the tersest of all carefree promiscuity gives way to a mood of aging desire and violence is kept to a minimum, even though the threat of violence is everywhere. The wise-guy, almost vaudevillian tone of the book gives way in the film to a clipped melancholy, unblinking and loaded with gravity. Crowded with incident, casually violent, narrated with a sort of comic grandiosity, it works its effects entirely through the power of an unleashed dialect, and the effect is something like a Gallic marriage of Damon Runyon and Mickey Spillane.īecker keeps the novel’s milieu and a good number of its characters-and changes just about everything else. Told in the first person by the aging career criminal Max le Menteur (played in the film by Jean Gabin), Simonin’s novel is an exuberant exercise in argot for its own sake and even comes with a glossary to help the reader wade through its impasto of criminal discourse. In fact Becker, with the help of Simonin, pretty much threw the book out the window. Albert Simonin’s novel Touchez pas au grisbi is said to have had a revolutionary impact on French crime writing, and Jacques Becker’s film version had a similarly transformative effect on French crime films, yet film and novel bear little resemblance to each other.
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