Falling between Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge, this would appear in some ways, at least superficial ways, to be Jean-Pierre Melville's most "personal" project, deviating from the archetypal, abstract, imitation-American gangster films with which he is most identified, veering instead toward his first-hand experiences as a Jew in the French Resistance. No matter how large the element of autobiography in it, the actual source of the film is a novel by Joseph Kessel, author of Belle de Jour (of all things), and it's safe to say that this is a Melville film for people who want more overt "substance," more basis in reality, and above all more virtue in their outlaws. That's not to say that people who just want more trench-coated gangsters will be left out in the cold. Or out, rather, in the warm. It is possible, to some extent, to fit pieces of the film into a classic crime-story pattern: jail time, jailbreak, revenge on a rat, caper plans, recruitments, betrayals, and so forth. But the extent of that is limited. The tautness and unity of a Melville gangster film have here been supplanted by the episodic, the discursive, the desultory, and the disjointed, stretching out to a taxing two and a half hours. (The assortment of first-person and third-person narrators is one gauge of the disunity.) While the gray-blue colorless color carries on the look of Le Samourai, the carrying-on is markedly less artful with Pierre Lhomme as cameraman in place of Henri Decaë. And the actual camerawork evinces the slippage toward expedient, lazy zoom shots (one camera set-up where two are called for) that became so conspicuous in Le Cercle Rouge and so detrimental to the director's reputation for masterful control. Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Simone Signoret, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Claude Mann, Paul Crauchet. (1969) — Duncan Shepherd