There is something very suspect about the many films that make viewers complicit with crimes. And the "one more big job" plot induces eye-rolling and ennui in me, although, perhaps, it was not as tired a plot device in 1963 as it has become. Or, perhaps because "Mélodie en sous-sol" with various titles in English, including that of the novel by John Trinian on which it was based, The Big Grab plus "The Big Snatch," "Anyone Can Win," and "Any Number Can Win") mostly shows a novice making a big heist, that I found the movie, particularly its last half hour, interesting. Admittedly, I am more than willing to gaze at the Alain Delon of the early 1960s indefinitely, but this movie has much more than that for those less mesmerized than I am by the young Delon. In fact, the movie somehow won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film in the year the Oscar for that went to "8 1/2" and other non-Anglophone movies included Kurosawa's "High and Low," Polanski's "Knife in the Water," and Visconti's "The Leopard" (this last with Delon on display in color).

And billed above Delon was the formidable Jane Gabin, who had been "Pépé le Moko" and "La bête humaine," as well as the star of "La grande illusion" and "Le jour se lève." Gabin plays Charles, a 60ish career criminal who, at the start of the movie, is released from prison, goes home to a wife who wants to go to the French Riviera to open a bar/restaurant. Charles has ideas of his own about the French Riviera, but they do not involve going into legitimate business.

Instead, Charles has blueprints of a casino there. Knowing that he is too old to shimmy through ventilation ducts and down elevator shafts, Charles entrusts the heist he has planned to his former cellmate, a panther-like layabout "hood" named Francis (Delon). The introduction of Francis is hilarious: he is snapping his fingers to a jazz record, visible at first only from the neck down. He is rousted up by his mother who wants him to go out and get a job. After scrounging yet another loan from an auto mechanic cousin (who will become the driver for Charles in Cannes), he receives his assignment. The first part of it is to seduce someone in the casino's stage show so that he has free run of backstage.

This task proves surprisingly difficult, considering that I am not the only one who thinks that Delon at that time was the most handsome man in the world. However, many of the dancers are lesbian and the rest are either suspicious or already have a male patron. The scene of Francis striking out poolside is amusing to an African American pianist who speaks no French and to viewers. The scenes of back-projecting driving along the beach squabbling with an unconquered "conquest" are also delightfully funny. As are Gabin's slow burns and Delon's shrugs. Out of his leather jacket and tight swimming-suit and into a tuxedo, Delon looks ultra-suave.

Gabin is considerably annoyed by being kept waiting, but eventually the plan goes forward. I find the actual mechanics of heists oddly intriguing (herein as in "The Asphalt Jungle," "Rififi," "Topkapi," "Seven Thieves," the even better heist including Delon, Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Cercle Rouge," and even "The Score"). I will not reveal what happens during or after the heist, but will say that the denouement is very satisfying, more so than those in the other classic heist films. (The locale resembles "To Catch a Thief" and some of the heist mechanics may have been lifted from (the original) "Ocean's 11.")

The pairing of the crusty old crook Gabin and the sleek young seducer Delon is very entertaining. (It's hard to imagine them sharing a prison cell for a year, since Charles begrudges Francis's youthfulness as much as Francis's insouciance.) It's hard to tell how much of the comedy of the "ultra-cool" "hipster" was intentional, how much of it a result of the passage of decades.

The movie is in no rush to get to or through the heist. More comic than "thrill it minute," it nevertheless does built tension. There is a 121-minute Japanese DVD—the American one runs 103 minutes—without English subtitles. The English subtitles in the 103-minute version are in yellow, so none of the words is lost against white backgrounds in the splendid (though not particularly noirish) cinematography of Louis Page (who also shot other films starring Gabin and directed by Henri Verneuil, a decidedly non-nouvelle vague director).

There are no DVD extras, not even a theatrical trailer. (I'd like to know how the film was marketed both to French and to American audiences at the time!)



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD