Highly rated by Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson and Bertrand Tavernier, Classe tous risques is a truly great, astonishingly neglected French crime movie, deserving of far wider renown. The dazzling directorial debut of Claude Sautet (1924 - 2000), better known for his later films Un Coeur en hiver (1992) and Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (1995), it will be released in cinemas nationwide on 13 September.
Classe tous risques stars the great Italian-born character actor Lino Ventura as Abel Davos, a once powerful Parisian gangster, convicted of multiple crimes in France and sentenced to death in absentia, who has grown weary of his Italian exile and longs to return home with his wife and two small children. In order to finance this ambition, he decides to pull one last job boldly executed in broad daylight on the streets of Milan before heading in the direction of Nice. The getaway proves highly perilous, and Abel realises that he will never make it to Paris without a little help from his friends. But his old pals and partners-in-crime despite the incredible debt they all owe him are reluctant to risk their own safety. Instead they send a complete stranger, the fresh-faced Eric Stark (the young, still unknown Jean-Paul Belmondo), to escort their former comrade from Nice to Paris.
Scored by Georges Delerue and shot in expressive black and white by Ghislain Cloquet (who was to win an Oscar for Tess), Classe tous risques is based on a novel by death-row-inmate-turned-writer José Giovanni (Le trou, Le deuxième souffle) whose intimate knowledge of the underworld helped steer him away from cliché. Brilliantly suspenseful and surprisingly moving, it is a devastating study of loyalty and betrayal, distinguished by a bleak, incisive psychological realism.
The relative obscurity of Sautet’s superb thriller is in many ways an accident of history. It was simply swept away in the frenzy of excitement generated by the Nouvelle Vague which made its classical virtues appear old-fashioned. Released in Paris in March 1960, it was almost immediately overshadowed by Godard’s Breathless (Belmondo’s international breakthrough) which opened a week later.
Now, more than half a century on, the mists which obscured Sautet’s achievement have cleared. In the words of Tavernier: “We’ve come to understand that Classe tous risques … was just as revolutionary as Breathless … Sautet was renewing the genre, profoundly, from the inside, instantly turning dozens of contemporary films into dusty relics.” The BFI’s release will enable cinema audiences to relish in full this wonderful rediscovery.
The film’s nationwide release will coincide with a month long retrospective of Claude Sautet’s work at BFI Southbank from 11 September until 7th October.Check your local independent/Arthouse cinema for listings