It's probably the movie I have the most seen in my entire life. The first time was in 1972, a Sunday evening, on the first channel. I was only nine years old, and was astonished at this time. Since then, I have never missed any of the airing of this french masterpiece. First, the armored truck heist of the beginning, somewhere in the north of France countryside, with the Serge Gainsbourg soundtrack (Requiem pour un con)is absolutely terrific. I consider it as the most outstanding armored truck attack of the whole crime movie industry. And I am a specialist for this kind of topic - see my other comments. I guess many other film makers were inspired by this sequence. Olivuer Marchall, for 36, Quai des Orfèvres, confessed he was. And Andre Pousse, as Quinquin, the ruthless killer, is also here brilliant at the most. I say he gives in this feature his best performance ever. Unforgettable. When he kills Dany Carrel, It's so good, because you don't expect this. Or this other scene, just after he has killed on of his accomplices with his wife, he quietly checks the horse race tickets while looking for the results on the TV. And concerning one point which has not been told about by the other users, is the police settings. We see a very modern police headquarters, with computers, and the film was made in 1968...Even three decades later, the Quai des Orfèvres - the actual french police headquarters - so know all around the world - was not like this. So nothing is really realistic in this film. Nothing to do with the new french crime movies à la Olivier Marchall. I won't talk about the Alpine Renault used by the police officer, with Jean Gabin sitting in it !!!Yes folks, this is a must see film for those who have missed it.

I think it an error to judge this film on plot alone - the story is the skeleton of a brightly stylized action fantasy which surely owes much to the garish Japanese crime films of the mid '60s. The police offices are not the grimy smoke-stained green-painted reality of battered wood desks and clattering file cabinets, but more nearly resemble the lair of the master-criminal with pivoting wall maps, poster-sized mug shots, and moving silhouettes cast on frosted glass walls. Police activity is a montage of blinking lights, fingers pressing buttons, walls of TV screens, streams of punched tape, and they thunder around the city in streamlined sports cars, not blocky grayish sedans. The inevitable night club is half surrealism, half agitprop performance, through which the stolid and always immaculate protagonist floats like an iceberg. The criminals drag their elaborate apparatus from the trunk of a huge sculptured American car and shoot gouts of flame and bazooka rockets in an eternally gray French winter, setting the snow itself on fire. They pour out of bright yellow mail trucks and blast machine guns at an army of police through obscuring clouds of drifting smoke. Le Pacha deserves to be viewed with fresh eyes because every scene and setting is stimulating and rewarding.

Well, it may possibly not have aged that well, notably the story line, that's pretty linear, but this film nevertheless has a few decent assets.First, the cast, granted you get Gabin playing lead, or rather freewheeling lead, but look at the rest of the cast : an impressive array of distinctive supporting actors, many of which can be spotted in many other films of the day, who do a spendid job in here, even when silent. For example, André Pousse has the perfect face for the ruthless gangster job he does in the movie.Second asset is the mood, a sort of sticky, foggy, terribly square version of the late sixties. The final scene in a rundown factory is truly awesome. This atmosphere is enhanced by Serge Gainsbourg's splendidly sober score (Gainsbourg himself appears in one scene, singing the striking "Requiem pour un con"), based on mesmerising percussion loops (way ahead of its time) or very gentle hammond organ parts. Oh and one song by Brigitte Bardot ("Harley Davidson") is also featured as background to one scene.Third, which can only be fully appreciated with a good command of French, is the script and dialogue, where Michel Audiard delivers some of his hilarious trademark one-liners, such as "le jour où on mettra les cons sur orbite, ben t'as pas fini de tourner" ["the day they'll put gits on orbit, you'll be far from stopping to revolve"], which rely on slang and adequate delivery to give an unmistakable texture to the lines.The only real downers here are the embarrassingly "hip" nightclub scenes, complete with sitar-laden raga-rock, that are pretty unwatchable to today's standards.Last point : it's pretty violent for its time, but in an almost choreographed way, which could in a way evoke "Spaghetti" Westerns or Sam Peckinpah's work...An enjoyable slice of 1960s french cinema, simply does the job.

and the plot may seem familiar from a dozen other crime/thriller movies you have seen, but the character is played by an aging Jean Gabin, who does one of his best performances I can recall. The film depicts well Paris night-life, and the dangerous links between clubs, girls, racketeers, and the Police, in a realistic approach to mid-1960's life.