Touchez-pas au Grisbi (Del Duca Films, Antares Produzione Cinematografica, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards I kept on Turner Classic Movies for a film I’d long been curious about but had never had a chance to see: Touchez-pas au Grisbi (1954). I think I’d had this movie confused with another French caper film from a year later, Rififi, which was directed by Jules Dassin after he was forced out of Hollywood by the blacklist. Part of my confusion was that harmonica player Larry Adler, who was also driven out of the U.S. by the blacklist, had recorded the themes from both Grisbi and Rififi, though the harmonica player in Grisbi (as the original U.S. distributor abbreviated the title; the literal translation is Don’t Touch the Loot but in Britain it was called Honour Among Thieves) was Jean Wetzel. Grisbi was directed by Jacques Becker from a novel of the same title by Albert Simonin, who worked on the screenplay with Becker and Maurice Griffe. It’s basically a tale of depressingly ordinary criminals, including the lead character, Max (Jean Gabin, nearing 50 and making a major comeback in this after he’d briefly left for Hollywood after the Nazi occupation of France, returned, joined a Free French garrison so he could fight fascism for real, but had been largely forgotten by French movie audiences after the war). Max had masterminded the theft of eight large gold bars from Orly, the largest airport near Paris, worth a total of 500,000 francs and he’s hidden the bars in four suitcases and put them in the trunk of a car. (I was trying to figure out the make of the car; it looked vaguely like a Plymouth of the period and had a seven-letter name across the hood that looked like it said “Rosette.”) Alas, when Max tries to fence the bars with his uncle Oscar (Paul Oettly) he’s only offered 35,000 francs for them and he tries to hold out for 50,000. (The problem crooks have with fences willing to pay them only a fraction of what the loot is worth is a frequent issue in gangster movies.)

Max is visibly world-weary; introducing the film as part of his “Noir Alley” series (Grisbi is film noir thematically but not visually; cinematographer Pierre Montazel shot it not in chiaroscuro images with lots of shadows, but with an even grey tonality much like the later French Nouvelle Vague – “new wave” – films that mostly avoided studios and shot exteriors on real French streets and interiors inside French buildings) Eddie Muller said that if you put Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart together you’d have an actor in America equal to Jean Gabin’s importance in France. (That was a joke I used to make about Bob Marley; I said, “If Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Bob Dylan had been the same person, that person would have been as important in the history of rock as Bob Marley was in the history of reggae.”) What’s most interesting about Grisbi is the sheer ordinariness of these people’s lives: Max and his friend turned enemy turned friend again Henri “Riton” Ducros (René Dary) hang out at various nightclubs, mostly at one run by Madame Bouche (Denise Clare) that features dancing girls performing routines to recorded music. They also date various women – Max has at least two semi-serious girlfriends, Lola (Dora Doll), a dancer at Madame Bouche’s; and Betty (Marilyn Bufferd), a young rich woman who doesn’t have to work. Riton is jilted midway through the movie by Josy (Jeanne Moreau, who gets a special credit; obviously the producers knew what they had in her), who abandons him for a younger, hotter criminal named Angelo Frasier (former professional wrestler Lino Ventura in his first film). There’s a long scene between Max and Riton in which they’re having breakfast and the story, such as it is, comes virtually to a dead stop as they trade banalities and eat ordinary foods. I was particularly disturbed by an off-white substance on their table that comes in plastic tubs; at first both Charles and I thought it was margarine, but they were taking far too much of it for it to be used as a spread to flavor bread. Finally, after the movie was over, Muller explained that it was paté. (I’ve never eaten paté in my life and have no desire to do so, ever.) Muller said that this scene is the key one that seems to divide audience opinions about this movie; people expecting a crime film to contain lots of action are put off by it, while those with subtler tastes in entertainment enjoy the sheer vulgarity of it.

Indeed, Grisbi generally is an object lesson in what the late Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Though there is one big action sequence towards the end – a shoot-out on a deserted country road in which Angelo and his gang try to hijack the gold bars, and ultimately blow up the car containing them and set it on fire – that isn’t the outright ending of the film. It actually ends with Max at one of his favorite diners, in which he and fellow customers discuss how the police (who are totally invisible in this film) finally recovered the stolen gold from the wreckage of the car containing it after the heat of the fire had melted the ingots (one wonders if Becker and Simonin got the idea for this ending from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, both B. Traven’s novel and John Huston’s film) and wonder just who masterminded the robbery in the first place. Grisbi is a quite good movie that turns the expectations of a crime movie on their heads – for one thing, it takes place after the big robbery has already occurred (in a U.S. version, the robbery would have been the focal point and been depicted in great detail). It also has the sort of frankness about human frailties that established an American audience for European films in the 1950’s when they started being routinely released here, not just about people’s sex lives but their drug use as well. One scene shows Max arranging for his protégé Marco (Michel Jourdan) to work as a drug dealer for Pierrot (Paul Frankeur), owner of Madame Bouche’s, and even before that a woman in Max’s car is shown sprinkling cocaine on a cigarette case and inhaling it. I did a double-take on that scene and thought, “Did she really just do what I think she did?” I don’t really think of Grisbi as a deathless classic, but it’s quite a good film and well worth watching precisely because of its slow, relatively action-less plotting and the extent to which it treats its criminals as just ordinary people who happen to make their livings in less than legal ways.