Sean Nam at The Baffler:
When the French crime film Classe tous risques—the English title, The Big Risk, fails to capture the pun on insurance policies and travel accommodations—premiered in Paris in March 1960, it was undercut by no less a modern heretic than Jean-Luc Godard, whose Breathless had premiered only a week before. Both films starred Jean-Paul Belmondo, an ex-boxer whose hardscrabble looks were belied by his soft pout. He plays underworld citizens in both films: In Breathless, the scapegrace Michel Poiccard, stroking his thumb across his lips in a pastiche of Humphrey Bogart, and in Classe tous risques a young louche named Éric Stark. The film’s director, Claude Sautet, was thirty-six at the time, having apprenticed for years as an assistant director of middling, prefab projects—George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), which Sautet cowrote, being a key exception. Sautet is mostly an unknown quantity in anglophone circles and Classe tous risques is probably his most recognizable achievement thanks to the Criterion Collection, which gave it one of its comprehensive DVD treatments in 2008.
more here.
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