Classe Tous Risques [The Big Risk] ***** (1960, Lino Ventura, Sandra Milo, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Marcel Dalio) – Classic Movie Review 236

Classe Tous Risques (1960, Lino Ventura, Jean-Paul Belmondo).

Lino Ventura is perfect as a doomed anti-hero in Claude Sautet’s bleak, tough 1960 French film noir-style gangster film Classe Tous Risques [The Big Risk]. Sandra Milo plays a young actress befriended by a young hood (Jean-Paul Belmondo).

With his crumbled, world-weary, boxer’s face, Lino Ventura is perfect as a doomed anti-hero in Claude Sautet’s amazingly bleak, tough French film noir-style gangster film Classe Tous Risques [The Big Risk], released in 1960. How did Ventura become a movie star and such a good one? He doesn’t look much, or seem to do much, but he inhabits the space, as somebody more actorish could never do.

Ventura plays Abel Davos, a fugitive gangster, a struggling professional crook trying to get back to the supposed safety of Paris with his family after an exile in Milan, where he does one last little robbery to help him finance his way, killing a couple of men.

In Paris, he has several gangster buddies who all owe him for past favours. Notable among them are Claude Cerval as Raoul Fargier, Michel Ardan as Henri Vintran, called Riton, and Marcel Dalio’s shifty-looking receiver Arthur Gibelin. They are all bound to help, aren’t they? It’s that honour among thieves thing.

Classe Tous Risques (1960, Lino Ventura, Marcel Dalio).

Abel puts the wife Thérèse (Simone France) and his two young boys on the train to Nice, and then sets off with his crook buddy Raymond (Stan Krol) in the car, intending to meet up with them there. Somehow, he has to drive through a heavily guarded frontier roadblock to get into France, then later through another to get into Paris. Getting under the police radar is kind of majorly tricky, because they are dogging his steps all the while.

A fair old number of dead bodies and quite a bit of fast, casual violence follow.

Hidden in a hotel with his two boys in Nice by a reluctant former associate, Abel rings Riton to get him and Fargier to come and collect him. Riton now runs a bar and Fargier a hotel so they refuse but buy an ambulance and recruit a young gangster called Éric to smuggle Abel and his boys to Paris. Abel is not at all pleased about this lack of honour among thieves. He is in a fairly desperate situation and he feels betrayed by his old friends.

With lots of immediacy and freewheeling location filming, it has a very New Wave feel, and one of its icons in Jean-Paul Belmondo, so it’s ironic that the reputations of both the film and director Claude Sautet (his debut) were swept away by the Nouvelle Vague. It arrived in England late, at about the time of Breathless in 1964. But it’s not Jean-Luc Godard you think of here but the films of Jean-Pierre Melville.

Belmondo appears late on in the movie and disappears a little before the end, but he is excellent, memorable indeed, as Éric Stark, a surprisingly softhearted and sympathetic, though ultra-tough, young hood. Belmondo has a boxer’s face too, but not so crumbled and world-weary. He makes an excellent double act with Ventura, a new kid on the block proving virtually Ventura’s sole, loyal friend when his old buddies let him down. Sandra Milo plays Liliane, a young actress befriended by Éric, another appealing character, who also proves loyal in return for Éric stopping on the road and saving her when she is being attacked by a man.

I don’t want to oversell Classe Tous Risques but I do want to recommend it highly. It might not be a great movie, or a lost masterpiece, but it is an extremely good one. It is credible, thrilling, exciting and vibrantly made. It feels like an insider’s story not the uniformed guesswork of some young Hollywood wannabee. It works vibrantly as a crime thriller, as well as a psychological study and a character-driven drama.

It is intelligently written too, finding fresh angles on the old situations of honour among thieves. Plotwise, it’s not a specially good, or well-constructed story, more a series of ensuing, cause-and-effect situations, more like real life, I guess. It might not always work but that’s good here. It feels vivid and refreshing.

It is an adaptation of the novel by José Giovanni [Joseph Damiani], using his personal experience of real gangsters. The Abel Davos character is based on a man he met in prison, who was also known as Le Mammouth because of his size. Danos was a henchman for the Carlingue (or French Gestapo) from 1941 to 1944, and he was sentenced to death and shot for collaboration on 13 March 1952.

Straight after his release from prison, Joseph Damiani wrote his first 1957 novel, The Break (Le Trou), under the name of José Giovanni, filmed as Le Trou by Jacques Becker in 1960. His second 1958 novel Le Deuxieme Souffle (Second Breath) was filmed by Jean-Pierre Melville as Le Deuxieme Souffle in 1966, also starring Ventura,

The film’s ending is totally sudden and utterly ruthless. It helps to keep any sentimentality at bay, though there more or less isn’t any anyway. It’s the tough tone and, especially, the location filming that keep it feeling newly minted. The long, fragrant section in the streets of Milan at the start is great – perhaps the best in the movie.

Shooting took place from 7 October to 8 December 1959 on locations including Nice, Paris and Milan.

The cast are Lino Ventura as Abel Davos, Jean-Paul Belmondo as Éric Stark, Sandra Milo as Liliane, Marcel Dalio as Arthur Gibelin, Jacques Dacqmine as Police inspector Blot, Claude Cerval as Raoul Fargier, Michel Ardan as Henri Vintran, called Riton, Stan Krol as Raymond Naldi, and Simone France as Thérèse Davos.

Despite a long career, Sautet directed only 12 more films. He managed to come back spectacularly in old age in the Nineties with masterwork films examining inter-personal relationships, especially Un Coeur en Hiver and Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud, winning the César as Best Director for both. He died in 2000 after making only 14 films in 40 years.

Classe Tous Risques = Class All Risks. But the title’s one of those tricksy puns the French are fond of. Classe Tous Risques = Classe Touriste = Tourist Class. However it could translate as ‘Consider All Risks’.

Sandra Milo (born Salvatrice Elena Greco; 11 March 1933 – 29 January 2024) won a Nastro d’Argento for Best Supporting Actress for each of her roles in Federico Fellini’s 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits.

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© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 236

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