Touchez pas au grisbi youtube movie#

Touchez pas au grisbi youtube movie#

Eyeing longtime Pink Smoke favorite Grisbi like a coveted bar of gold, the guys question why it's so difficult to contextualize such an obvious masterpiece, its director's place in cinema history and what the movie is really about. Playing aging gangsters intent on making off with that last big score, the legendary leading man slipped into these late-career roles like a comfy pair of silk pajamas - and looked amazing in those pajamas, too.

It’s always been there.” It's a “Jean Gabin is getting too for this shit” double feature! On this episode, hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs discuss two unforgettable French crime films: Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and Henri Verneuil's Any Number Can Win (1963), both starring the grandfather of quiet cool, M. The climax is an airtight roadside face-off that ends in gunfire, grenades exploding, and a car chase, but nearly everything before it, from scenes of gangsters lounging at their exclusive restaurant hang-out to Max and Riton simply sharing wine and bread, are just as slick and satisfying.“Don’t gush over the sea.

Becker makes the mundane as compelling as the crackling action in which the film crescendos, masterfully wielding silence and musical cues (Max’s song is a wistful harmonica melody) in tandem with the visual grammar of film noir. Riton, whose young lover (Jeanne Moreau in the femme fatale role) has just taken up with another man closer to her own age, examines himself in the bathroom mirror, and gently pushes at the sides of his eyes, as if he’s trying to remember the smoothness of his younger skin.Ĭonnections aside, this film stands firmly on its own two feet. A sense of late life melancholy is perhaps clearest in the scene where prior to his kidnapping, Max’s friend Riton stays the night at Max’s apartment, and the two are shown in their pajamas getting ready for bed (which immediately recalls the scene in The Irishman where Hoffa and Sheeran spend a night at a hotel together). Though Gabin was twenty years or so younger than De Niro at the time of their respective performances, they share a similar weariness in how they carry and express themselves, and not only that, but their characters also obviously recall one another: Gabin’s Max and De Niro’s Frank are aging gangsters whose loyalty to a friend is tested, and whose looking back on their lives adds a strain of regret to their film’s emotional undercurrents. After his long-time friend and partner is kidnapped by rivals who want his recently acquired loot, Gabin’s cool, collected, and finely dressed Max is forced to put off retirement just a little bit longer, and potentially choose between saving his pal and his nest egg.ĭespite their differences in scope, the influence of Becker’s film on Scorcese’s latest crime saga is loud and clear. Before there was The Irishman, there was Jacques Becker‘s Touchez Pas au Grisbi, an impeccably crafted crime film from 1954, in which French acting legend Jean Gabin plays a worn out gangster in the twilight moments of his career.