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"The biggest take since the Sabine women," preparation and aftermath. Just out of jail and tubercular, the crook (Jean Servais) gets no respect at the poker dive, his last job is the jewelry with "more alarms than a firehouse." A job for friends, the family man (Carl Möhner) and the good-natured Lothario (Robert Manuel) and the Milanese safecracker (Jules Dassin, revealing a Mischa Auer side), face to face with the state-of-the-art security system. "It's getting harder to make a living..." The Naked City's location shooting comes in handy when photographing Paris damp and cold in winter, the spinning silhouette at the "L'Age d'Or" nightclub points up the expatriate's growing taste for abstraction. ("Execrable," Truffaut calls the song in his review, Dassin redeems it with a sinuous long take of the musicians warming up while Magali Noël stretches and hums.) The famous centerpiece is a silent symphony from dusk till dawn, virtually a mirror of minimalist filmmaking—four burglars sweating against tell-tale vibrations, their larcenous raptness punctuated by muffled hammer blows, drilling, a single piano note, a siren trying to shriek through a boxful of fire-extinguisher foam. (A surreal strain runs through the procedure, and indeed there's Lautréamont's umbrella on this dissecting table, turned upside-down to catch falling bits of plaster.) The hole in the safe cuts to a pair of gendarmes noticing a suspicious car, betrayals and kidnappings and executions follow. "So, tough guys. Is it war games?" American noir given continental bleakness, as befits a director who envisions an underground with more integrity than political witch hunts. Race to the finish, an old hood's desperation is a boy's cops-and-robbers game. The salute to Touchez Pas au Grisbi is returned in Le Trou. Cinematography by Philippe Agostini. With Janine Darcey, Pierre Grasset, Robert Hossein, Marcel Lupovici, Marie Sabouret, and Claude Sylvain. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |