An underrated crime flick from the early seventies with rather good actors, and also an improbable cast, but not do after all. Henry Silva, one great heavy from the USA and André Pousse, the equivalent of Silva but from France. As was Lino Ventura vs Leo Gordon in Claude Sautet's L'ARME A GAUCHE or Michel Constantin and Charles Bronson in Terry Young's DE LA PART DES COPAINS, or even Richard Crenna and Alain Delon in Melville's UN FLIC. I love this. In this film, I would not have been surprised to see Marcel Bozzuffi. He and Pousse were together in Roger Pigaut's COMPTES A REBOURS. The story of an escaped con - Silva - who pulls a sort of fake heist in order to trick, swindle some important hoods like him. Good performances in this film made by a director who will later give us some erotic stuff, as did Claude Bernard Aubert, the former director of L'AFFAIRE DOMINICI. One last word on the novelist whose this screenplay was written from: Jacques Risser. This is also an underrated crime author, a sort of poor man's Auguste Le Breton whom he was a close friend. Risser was a former safe cracker who spent many years behind bars and who has cell mates such as ex OAS leaders, from the Algeria war. According to Le Breton, Risser could have written great stories from these guys. But he preferred hard boiled gangster movies. I must admit that he was not as interesting as Pierre Lesou. But he deserves to be discovered again.

It was very trendy in those years to hire American actors :René Clément had done it several times notably for "le Passager de la Pluie" where Charles BRonson played opposite Marlene Jobert.Henry Silva plays the American gangster here, a deserter (he was a marine).His strange face could have been used to good effect ,had he been properly directed.The director's career essentially consisting of porno movies (it shows in the scene in the private nightclub 'l'Hippodrome" where greybeards play dice (big dice) to "win" the local "bunnies" ),what can we expect from him in the thriller field?Not much and that's exactly what we get.The gangsters,the firemen and the cops are so naive ,so dumb (the fireman takes the biscuit: six cars are burning but he does not care)one can only regret the director did not make a spoof on gangsters movies like "le Cave se Rebiffe" .But ,with the eventual exception of André Pousse ,all the actors take themselves seriously .The plot has enough holes to fill the Albert Hall ;one example: a dangerous gangster has escaped from jail and the Police do not seem to bother.

I think this is the best film Jean-Claude Roy ever made. It reminds fondly the Lautner-Audiard films of the late 60s-early 70s, with the same team of legendary actors : André Pousse, Georges Géret, Dalban, Philippe Clay... It's such a pleasure to see them together ! That film shouldn't be so underrated - in fact, I think it's simply completely unknown, and that's a real shame, because due to its cynicism, its cast, its humor and its music (Bernard Gérard stands here at the heaven of European funk-masters alongside with Piero Umiliani), it stands the comparison with Lautner's works, although it looks - and actually WAS - really cheaper. If you can, prefer the French version, for its clever dubbing of Henry Silva's voice (made by an American actor whose name I can't remember living at the time in Paris), because in English you don't have any equivalent to the inimitable voice of André Pousse.