Overshadowed by the daring inventions of the French New Wave film movement by an audacious set of newcomers (Godard, Truffaut) during the better part of the 1960s, director Claude Sautet’s practice tended toward a more subdued presentation of French life. It was a style that didn’t gain much traction during the French New Wave heyday, but became paramount in the 1970s, when his films became impressionistic documents of French bourgeois life.
Sautet’s success as a filmmaker was largely due to his collaboration with famed actress Romy Schneider, who, as an Austrian expat living and working in France, had captured the French public’s heart and made significant strides in her career as a muse for the rising filmmaker. Sautet’s films were often about married couples doing married-couple things and surviving married-couple issues.
By no means a box-office contender (at least initially) against the flashier exploits of Godard (who practically reinvented the feature film every time he made a new one), Sautet did help forge an admirable path in character-study drama. Low-key and reflective meditations on domestic life, many of the director’s films were pointed comments on how even the most assured families can be the victims of upheaval when cultural codes are challenged.
Claude Sautet’s earlier work can be viewed as a bridge to his better-known and more widely respected body of work in the 1970s. Criterion’s release of the filmmaker’s 1960 film, Classe tous risques (The Big Risk), reveals the filmmaker at the first marking of his talents, exploring the noirish affectations of the crime drama, and the violence and darkness of the male psyche. It is miles away from the dramatic fare he would later cover in his career, but it retains the earliest sketches of his ideas of family as culture, and its eventual dissolution.
Starring Lino Ventura as Abel, a weary gangster looking for a way out of criminal life, Classe tous risques begins with Abel fleeing Italy and the Italian police close on his heels. On his way to France with fellow gangster and friend, Raymond (Stan Krol), and his wife and two young children, Abel evades authorities long enough to make it past the Italian border. In a shootout with police, Raymond and Abel’s wife are killed, leaving Abel alone with his two sons.
Desperate to provide a safe space for his children, Abel appeals to his old friends in France, former gangsters, for help to get him to safety. Rather than get involved in a lifestyle they no longer care for, they send Eric (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a young and affable gangster, to help Abel and his children get around. A cautious friendship forms between the two men, with Eric acting as a bodyguard for Abel and the other boys.
Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo Claude Sautet’s 1960 film, <em>Classe tous risques</em> | Courtesy of Criterion
Matters, however, are complicated when, along the way, they meet a young woman named Liliane (Sandra Milo), who begins a romance with Eric. Abel struggles to keep his children safe, sending them off to stay with family friends, while he desperately tries to find safe places to hide. In his attempt to procure money so that he and his children may leave France, Abel’s former violent way of life begins to intrude progressively on his plans for escape, leading to unavoidable tragedies for all involved.
Claude Sautet’s idea of noir is expressed mainly through the paradigms of emotionally bound familial relationships, rather than the actions and atmospheres that the genre is normally noted for. Despite the usual tropes of double-crosses and plot twists, Classe tous risques seems to place all tension on its protagonist’s evaluation of character, a narrative technique that would define Sautet’s more popular ‘70s films. This doesn’t hamper his attempt at French noir; rather, it widens the genre’s scope by presenting a particular family culture through the prism of marginal lifestyles.
Crime as a way of life is a stirring plot device as any, but here, Sautet seeks to deliver a message of paternal triumph and failure that resonates in ways that feel very poignant. The heart doesn’t pound as it might in these types of thrillers, but rather quivers from the reverberations of its plucked heartstrings. It may make for a slightly melancholy work, but Sautet makes effective use of testing the social and interactive dynamics between the bourgeoisie and the underclass to gain emotional mileage.
There is the danger of confusing the viewer with too much drama and machinations, the usual plot devices of the noir threatening to take over what is essentially a family drama. However, Classe tous risques’ script (sourced from a 1958 novel of the same name by José Giovanni) ensures a cast of strongly-written characters whose motivations and psychological drives sit adjacently and in perfect harmony with the action and violence onscreen.
Ventura fashions a hard-edged, sometimes callous, but still likeable leading man out of his character, abjuring the common hang-dog expressions worn by many film noir leads for a po-faced reading of parental distress. The youthful and spry Belmondo (who had cemented his star status in that same year’s Breathless, Godard’s masterpiece), provides the appropriate diametric energy to demarcate Ventura’s chilly, nearly obelisk-like presence that dominates the story.
Stylistically, Claude Sautet keeps things economical, framing shots minimally to outline rather than detract from the earnest performances. This particular approach doesn’t negate the filmmaker’s way with the camera; he manages some truly effective, albeit subtle, touches of visual storytelling. Peopled with everyday citizens who crowd the frames like glittering jewels in motion, Classe tous risques’ world is as wide as it is insular, producing a friction that bristles between the bleak existence of Abel and company and the, at times, glossy, cosmopolitan surroundings. Sautet effectively blends the dismal veracities of Italian neorealism with the emerging trends of the French New Wave to present a work that is as much rooted in traditional European drama as in the then-contemporary cinema of the 1960s.
Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Classe tous risques features a beautifully sharp black-and-white transfer that is tonally balanced in its monochromatic scale. Blacks, whites and greys are perfectly rendered in the images so that the ageing world of a retired gangster is brought to splendid and romantically cinematic life. Audio and dialogue are clear and generally free of any distortion.
The package also contains informative supplements, including interview segments from a documentary on Claude Sautet, an interview with novelist José Giovanni, and an interview with leading actor Lino Ventura. Rounding out the package is a booklet featuring an interview with the director and an essay on his films. The film is in the French language with optional English subtitles.
Classe tous risques is the work of a filmmaker testing the grounds of style and narrative. The film, despite existing in a space of identity-searching, is a small marvel in itself. Claude Sautet levels the grim and sometimes grisly noir down to a foundation where the actions become especially internalized as meaningful conduct of human life. He would further develop the family drama in his films Les Choses de la vie (1970) and Oscar-nominated Une histoire simple (1978), finding, at last, his voice in the canon of French cinema.