Touchez pas au Grisbi (Don't Touch the Loot)

About thirty minutes before the final shoot-out in Jacques Becker's 1954 "Touchez pas au Grisbi," this gangster film seems to stall-out. A strange, immobile, curiously detailed lassitude becalms the narrative. Details pile-up, but nothing happens. An elderly, if handsome, gangster, Max, played by Jean Gabin, has retreated to his elegantly appointed, secret hideway -- it's a Parisian apartment with a garage underneath where Max has hidden eight bars of gold bullion hijacked from a plane at Orly. Max has come there with his dim-witted friend, Riton. Riton has fallen hard for a much younger woman, a showgirl named Josy (Jeanne Moreau) and Max wants to warn his old friend that the dame is a fatal snare -- she is also sharing her favors with a much younger and more vicious mobster played by Lino Ventura. Max and Ricon share a snack of pate spread on biscuits -- we see Gabin open the terrine after unsealing it, break the biscuits and, using a knife, carefully anoint the biscuits with the pate. Then, Gabin goes to a well-stocked closet, gets towels and pajamas for himself and his buddy. Amazingly enough, Becker shows us both men in their freshly starched pajamas brushing their teeth, one after another, in the same neat and clean bathroom. The tone is fussy, pedantic, maternal. Although Gabin is a killer and professional criminal, he is strangely feminine, like an old lady with a stiff, constipated gait -- he's like your favorite Aunt, always fussing about your well-being and making sure that you have enough to eat. The point of this episode is to show Gabin's solicitude and concern for his less competent, more unruly and passionate buddy, Riton. (In some ways, the relationship seems to prefigure the quasi-maternal bond between Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keital, with the same fatal consequences, in Scorsese's "Mean Streets".) Becker's film is classically constructed, built around an old and powerful conceit -- two mismatched men are loyal to one another to the death. Betrayed by Josy, Riton is held for ransom by other mobsters and Max has to exchange his loot to redeem his friend. Dames can come and go, but the real love story in this film is between Max and Riton. The movie rotates around two hang-outs -- a strip-tease place called Pierrot's where the world-weary Max barely glances at the naked girls on display and a cafe run by an old gun-moll that serves fish-stew and roast beef. Becker's mise-en-scene is weirdly detailed, fastidious, and persnickety -- he uses three shots to show a car turning around, idly surveys people as they amble down corridors and dark streets,and shows lots of doors opening and closing. The film's style is equivalent to Max's hovering over Riton and his unrelenting loyalty to his stupid friend; all t's are crossed and all i's dotted. The film's closely observed, over-detailed and prosaic technique pays-off in the big fire-fight at the film's climax, a battle conducted with Thompson machine guns and hand grenades that is a spectacularly vivid and effective action sequence. After all the mayhem, Max, ever elegant and suave, goes to lunch with his aristocratic mistress. Over soup, he learns that Riton has died of his gunshot wounds, intelligence that he receives with a vaguely rueful frown that only briefly animates his big, immobile face. Some of the details are very funny: an elderly money-launderer's girlfriend who struts around in slinky skin-tight garments at work, is later shown pensively listening to the old man on the telephone. She's just got out of the old man's bed and wears chaste, boyhish pajamas. A minor thug is dragged into a basement to be tortured. The torture turns out to be unnecessary and the gangsters dump him out of their sedan in a remote part of Paris. Chagrined, and, a little miffed, it seems, at not having been appropriately roughed-up, the kid kicks at the pavement with frustration. This is an excellent film.