Erik Moe Art & Design

Recently watched Le Trou (1960) and Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954), both by Jacques Becker. Each was memorable, but Le Trou is the more memorable one by far. Sure, the prison that it’s set in is rather quaint and silly with its freindly Frenchmen stockpiling cakes and sausages. Their comradarie and civility makes the Hogan’s Heroes prison camp look tough. The set-up can almost be cast aside just to justify the insanely long takes of hammers banging away at concrete, files hacking away on metal bars, and metal being thrust at stone. I didn’t time any of these shots, but some of them must have been eight minutes long of straight-up work. The clanging and banging went on so much longer than any narrative filmmaker would let it today — which is a shame. Watching concrete break apart through brute force and repeated blows is actually fairly compelling. After the first minute or so you get beyond the narrative questions (like “why don’t the guards hear this?”) and get into a sort of zenlike state as the solid stone of the cell floor crumbles. At that point you can start questioning the physical world entirely and those walls that make up your cell, man… It actually is rather reminicent of Rififi, Jules Dassin’s legendary 1955 heist flick in which there is an extremely long, almost silent segment that takes us through all the tense details of a jewel robbery.

Touchez Pas au Grisbi itself falls into my much loved heist flick subgenre. Though technically, this is more of a sequel to a heist flick, since the gangster (Jean Gabin) already has the loot from his ‘one last job that will let me and my beautiful girl (Jeanne Moreau, in this case) retire from this vicious life of crime.’ Here the weary mobster is torn between loyalty and social security as a rival gangster makes threats to Gabin’s long-time partner-in-crime.