Classe Tous Risques

Claude Sautet made his directorial debut with this tough, lean, smart piece of French crime cinema made on the cusp of the new wave. Stocky, barrel-chested French crime icon Lino Ventura plays the career criminal who tenderly leaves his wife and children to execute a brazen broad-daylight robbery. Sautet delivers the tense details of the robbery and the elaborate getaway from the streets of Milan to a boat waiting to deliver Ventura back from exile to his home country of France with precision and crisp professionalism, but that's merely prologue to the drama that follows when he's betrayed by his former gang. He hardens to a steely, cold savagery for revenge while an irresistibly charming Jean-Paul Belmondo (fresh from Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless") offers unflagging loyalty as a young thug with a worldly attitude and an old-school criminal code. Like so many directors of his generation, Sautet is seduced by the romantic codes of honor among thieves and glamorizes the inevitable doom that such a life entails. But he never flinches from the contradictions inherent in the enigmatic antihero, whose very professionalism puts his loved ones at risk, in this minor classic of cool French crime cinema.

The Criterion disc features a beautifully remastered transfer from a crisp print and includes an eight-minute excerpt from the documentary "Claude Sautet ou la magie invisible" that explores Sautet's professional beginnings and the development and making of "Classe Tous Risques." Sautet himself provides the combination narration and commentary with a voice-over interview. Also features an 11-minute interview with former criminal-turned-writer Jose Giovanni, created from the raw footage shot for "Claude Sautet ou la magie invisible" (most of it not seen in the documentary), and a collection of archival interviews with Ventura talking about the film and his career. All supplements are, like the film, in French with English subtitles. The accompanying booklet features recent essays by director Bertrand Tavernier and critic N.T. Binh, a 1962 appreciation by French crime cinema godfather Jean-Pierre Melville, and a reprint of an interview with Sautet.