![]() ![]() “You see the bags under our eyes? Do you think we’re a pretty sight?” Whether paying-off a restaurateur who may be implicated in his criminal exploits, putting up an accomplice on the run for a night in his secret apartment, or torturing a younger buck for information, his unhurried expression rarely changes. I want to retire,” he tells his right-hand man. Played by Jean Gabin, Max summarises his character’s frame-of-mind in no vague terms: “I was fed up with all our bullshit years ago. Touchez pas au grisbi is the story of a gangster’s compulsion to commit one more heist before retiring to a life of bubbly and well-proportioned broads. ![]() Becker’s 1954 film Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), often translated into English as “Don’t Touch the Loot”, therefore appears as a loaded artistic statement by an ageing don who died shortly before younger radicals would, in the eyes of many critics and historians, render him obsolete. So wide is the shadow cast on the country’s cinema by Truffaut, Godard and the ilk of Cahiers du Cinéma that even avowed masters of the medium like Jacques Becker, Agnès Varda and Louis Malle get blotted out retroactively by a culture industry which elevates the pyrotechnics of a À bout de souffle (1960) or a Jules et Jim (1962) over the staid intensity of a Le Trou (Becker, 1960) or a Cléo de 5 à 7 (Varda, 1962). ![]() In the light of the impending nouvelle vague, reflection on any aspect of post-WWII French film threatens to become a referendum. ![]()
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