Classe tous risques

(The Criterion Collection, 6.17.2008)

Claude Sautet is best known for subtle interpretations of French bourgeois life in such films as Un coeur en hiver and Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud. Yet the director began his career with genre films. Classe Tous Risques, released in 1960, is considered the best of his early work and it's a fascinating companion to similar crime movies made around the same time by Jean-Pierre Melville.

Classe Tous Risques (roughly translated as "at any risk") opens with an lengthy and exciting action sequence. Gangster Abel Davos (Lino Ventura) decides to end his long exile in Milan and sneak back into France with his wife (Simone France) and two young sons (Robert Desnoux and Thierry Lavoye) despite a death sentence hanging over his head in his native country. After dropping his family at a train station, Davos and henchman Raymond Naldi (Stan Krol) rob bank couriers and set out across Italy with police in pursuit.

The resulting roadblocks, multiple changes of transportation, and shoot-outs are staged more energetically even than in most American movies of the time. After a tragic gun battle, driver Erik Stark (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is dispatched from Paris to Nice to help Davos complete his journey. Sautet keeps the camera at a distance during these sequences so that we always know what both the gangsters and their pursuers are doing and then moves in for a violent exclamation mark, including a zoom (as was popular in Italian movies of the seventies).

Once in Paris, Davos begins questioning his reasons for being, experiencing an existential dilemma much like Melville's anti-heroes. While Stark continues a romance with an actress he met en route to Paris (Sandra Milo), Davos grows paranoid, rightly expecting treachery from his former colleagues. While the rather hasty resolution may puzzle those unfamiliar with French fatalism or the Italian neorealism many have cited as an influence on Sautet, Classe Tous Risques works equally well as a thriller and as a philosophical contemplation on a man doing what a man has to do. Fans of Melville's films, especially Le Doulos, should find a lot to like.

As with other collaborations between Criterion and Rialto Pictures, such as Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi, Classe Tous Risques offers what appears to be a perfect transfer. The images of cityscapes, open roads, and the sea captured by Ghislain Cloquet are alternately beautiful and haunting, as with a nighttime beach confrontation with customs guards. Cloquet -- who worked with Becker, Alain Resnais, Jacques Demy, Robert Bresson, Roman Polanski, Arthur Penn, and Woody Allen -- is one of the greatest cinematographers and here he is at his best.

If Classe Tous Risques has a weakness, it is Ventura. Often called the French (actually Italian) Robert Mitchum, Ventura is too inexpressive and lacks Mitchum's cool swagger. Belmondo, however, in the same year as Breathless, is not yet as self-conscious as he would later become. His easy grace offers counterbalance to Ventura's coiled tension.

The best of the extras is an 8-minute profile of Sautet drawn from 17 hours of audio interviews he conducted shortly before his death in 2000. Because his initial work as an assistant director was boring, he found himself trying to improve the scripts. Impressed with his creativity, Ventura recommended Sautet complete The Beast Is Loose when director Maurice Labro suddenly quit. Sautet's words are supplemented with comments from his widow, Graziella Sautet, Betrand Tavernier, and others (including Jose Giovanni, who helped adapt Classe Tous Risques from his novel).

A 12-minute interview with Giovanni in 2002, two years before his death, provides interesting background. A death-row inmate for eight years, Giovanni based Davos on a prominent gangster he met in prison. Krol was a fellow ex-convict cast by Sautet because he resembled American gangsters. Fourteen minutes of clips from interviews with Ventura from 1959 to 1987 are less illuminating with the actor discussing his life more than his movies.

Print extras include essays on Sautet by N. T. Binh and Tavernier, whose first published review was of Classe Tous Risques and who asked the director to convince the young critic's skeptical father that film was a profession like any other. In a 1962 tribute, Melville predicted that Sautet would become France's greatest filmmaker. In a 1994 interview, Sautet describes the film as depicting "the end of the traditional underworld and its flamboyant ways." He also discusses using wide shots to create the sensation of reality. When Sautet was expected to talk about Classe Tous Risques at two screenings, Melville rose from the audience to analyze the film in detail. -- Michael Adams