The late French film-maker Claude Sautet (he died in 2000) is best known to British audiences for his chamber piece Un Coeur En Hiver, a restrained love story about a violin virtuoso.
His 1960 debut feature is the kind of riproaring, existential gangster film you'd expect from Jean-Pierre Melville or a young Jean-Luc Godard.
Jean-Paul Belmondo shows the same swagger he brought to Godard's Breathless but the pick of the performances is from pug-faced, sad-eyed Lino Ventura as a once big-time thief who has reached the end of the line.
Sautet throws in some terrific chase sequences (by car and boat) and plenty of pathos: Ventura, as he is hunted down, looks forlorn in a way that only French gangsters can.
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