Soon, on a lonely stretch of highway in the dead of night, Max le Menteur must choose between steadfast loyalty to an old friend or monetary escape from a disappearing way of life he has long grown weary of. Outside forces in the squarish form of Italian gangster Angelo (Lino Ventura), plotting to betray nightclub owner Pierrot (Paul Frankeur) and Max through the foreign interloper’s seduction of Riton’s cheating - and chatting - girlfriend Josy, compromises Max’s recent gold bullion bars-heist of Orly International Airport, his “loot”, or grisbi, concealed in suitcases buried in the trunk of his Montmartre-omnipresent convertible.
Yet, within this world, at the height of his power and influence, Max le Menteur is part of a vanishing breed. With a revolving retinue of glamorous women on his right arm (Dora Doll, Marilyn Buferd), Max, always accompanied by his long-time partner Riton (René Dury), and often by Riton’s own showgirl paramour Josy (Jeanne Moreau), maintains the stylish standards of the Montmartre set in his double-breasted suits, sleek automobiles and three-fingered method of smoking cigarettes. Max (Gabin) lives the high life both above and apart from the atmospheric nightlife of Right Bank Paris. Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) and Grisbi’s Montmartre-set counterpart in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur (1956) were equally trend-setting in their respective approach, ushering in an era of French crime thrillers whose visual echoes and unmistakable milieu would be seen and felt for several subsequent decades, but Jacques Becker’s canny casting of Gabin in the role of Max le Menteur certainly cemented the style and personality of the French Série Noire on-screen. Style and honor combine in the preternaturally poised presence of actor Jean Gabin, who at age 49 was himself poised to embark on a second French wave of dark-poetic policiers, linking the expressive realism of prewar highlights like Pépé le Moko (1936), Le Quai des Brumes(1938), and La Bête humaine (1938) with a hard-earned reserve of unflappable sangfroid weighed heavily by the historically eventful years that followed. Haunts, aging gangster Max le Menteur glides with a leonine grace that is as Montmartre criminal class uniquely describes an underworld of afterhour cafés, The Scratch, and Hands off the Loot!, the unrenderable argot of the Variously Anglicized as Don’t Touch the Dough, Bury Publisher of translated American crime novels and their hardboiled domesticĬounterparts, Albert Simonin’s 1953 thriller Touchez pas au grisbiīrought the manicured, mannered, and miscreant denizens of Paris’s 18 th Arrondisement to the screen in director Jacques Becker’s influentialįilm adaptation.
STREET DATE: AUGUST 13 TH, 2019/KINO LORBER STUDIO CLASSICSįrom the pages of S érie Noire, the French postwar Jean Gabin Stylishly Embodies Montmartre Criminal Underworld
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