This model French gangster picture set the rules for the great sequence of underworld movies from Jean-Pierre Melville that followed.
Comment
06/24/06
Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (1953)
100 %
Reviews Counted: 22 Fresh: 22 Rotten:0 Average Rating: 8.3/10
Runtime: 1 hr 36 mins
Synopsis: Gabin, the quintessential tough-guy, and Moreau, resplendent as always, pair up for this heist film, one of the best of the French gangster films of the 1950s. In it, Gabin is an aging thief who has already pulled off what he thinks was his last big job, scoring enough gold to last him through his... [More]
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura
Director: Jacques Becker
Screenwriter: Jacques Becker, Maurice Griffe
Producer: Robert Dorfmann
Composer: Jean Wiener
Screenwriter: Jacques Becker, Maurice Griffe
Producer: Robert Dorfmann
Composer: Jean Wiener
Reviews
Top Critic
This portrait of Parisian gangsters, bound by loyalty and a rejection of outsiders, set the style for many that followed.
05/24/03
Top Critic
It's Gabin's show all the way, anticipating the melancholy, atmospheric gangster pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville that started to appear a couple years later.
01/23/08
The film is often confusing, especially during the first half, but Gabin and Ventura are well cast as hoods and Moreau is as appealing as ever as an underworld temptress.
01/23/08
Top Critic
Jacques Becker, who did such a fine job in painting the turn-of-the-century apache milieu in Casque D'Or, brings the same care and psychological overtones to a film on the modern racketeer element.
01/23/08
Top Critic
The acting is consistently good. M. Gabin is, of course, an old hand at bland toughness. Rene Dary and Paul Frankeur, as two colleagues; Jeanne Moreau and Dora Doll, as two unlucky ladies, and Lino Ventura and Denise Clair... are sordidly convincing.
03/25/06
Top Critic
It's those little character moments, balanced between charm and pathos, that make this film such a winner.
03/05/04
Top Critic
Every filmmaker from Francois Truffaut to Quentin Tarantino owes something of a debt to Becker's black-and-white boldness.
01/16/04
If it isn't the best trip you've ever taken to the dark Montmartre of the 1950s, it's nevertheless a real French noir. Irresistible, in other words.
12/12/03
Fifty years later, its trademark jukebox tune (a melancholy harmonica riff) still causes tingles, and its tough, laid-back elegance still seduces.
11/28/03
Its crisp black-and-white photography is truly seductive and its stoic celebration of honor among thieves make it one of the definitive French films noir of the '50s.
11/28/03
[Becker establishes] day-to-day life patterns that these characters leave behind like sludgy trails. He loads Grisbi with seedy nightclubs, after-hours restaurants, and bachelor apartments where the only on-hand food consists of stale biscuits.
09/29/03
A wonderful treasure from the seemingly inexhaustible cornucopia of crackling French crime dramas.
09/04/03
Top Critic
A meditation on what we are left with when life has let us down, played out in the haunted eyes of Jean Gabin.
09/04/03
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