Early and incontestably minor work by Claude Sautet, a good, solid, serious, straightforward, fatalistic crime thriller that gives little hint of the glories of his peak period in the Seventies. All the same, it can lay claim to some fine qualities: a fast-start robbery in broad daylight, open air, and plain sight; a Byzantine getaway route; excellent location work in Milan, the South of France, and Paris; an ending quite shocking, paradoxically, in its discretion; and a gentle emphasis on family, feelings, professional fraternity, which, along with the sparing doses of omniscient third-person narration, nudges the film at least a little ways into Sautet's "personal" territory. (The gangster hero, simply put, is at heart a "better" friend than his old friends, and the difference will prove to be his downfall.) Uppermost among its fine qualities, the film features, in the lead role, the great Lino Ventura, a self-possessed, barrel-chested ex-wrestler with a face of furrowed granite and eyes sodden from all they've seen: a face no less noble than Bogart's. It also features a dewy and skinny Jean-Paul Belmondo, just before his big splash in Breathless, as the lone-wolf hoodlum who befriends the hero when the latter's return from exile in Italy stalls in Nice, after his partner-in-crime and his wife have been gunned down in a shootout (he will run first to the side of his fallen buddy, then to his wife), leaving him with two young sons on his hands, effectively immobilizing him. An ex-boxer in real life as in the present script, with boxing gloves for bric-a-brac in his Paris apartment, Belmondo is already in full command of his cocky charm: "The nice thing about me is my left," he introduces himself to a lady in distress (Sandra Milo) after cold-cocking her harasser. (1960) — Duncan Shepherd