Bezahlt wird in Marseille

A pleasant French crime film with the unimitable Michel Constantin.

What's good in Les Hommes is the way it portrays Fanto's (Constantin) struggle both against the police and fellow mobsters. Fanto represents the old world where gangsters are gentlemen and important members of their communities. In the beginning Fanto has his tightly knit "family" around him, but as the new money starts pouring in (in the form of an American mobster Everett, played by the charismatic Henry Silva), the whole scene changes and becomes less pictoresque for Fanto.

The story is told in a beautifully low key tone that gives the audience time to experience everything with Fanto, the good and the bad.

Highly recommended for fans of genre

Released on video in Finland in the early eighties.

And starring the two most famous villains of the French industry from this period: Michel Constantin and Marcel Bozzuffi, the most iconic mobsters from French underground, and also an American iconic actor for gangster roles, the equivalent of Bozzuffi and Constantin: Henry Silva, who will stay in france for another French crime film: L'INSOLENT. This is a rough, tough, gritty, violent story, a gang war topic involving Corsicans, the French Sicilians. A vendetta story, moving, even a bit predictable, but a story about honor, revenge, freindship among virile men. A bloody tragedy. Real men. Not far from LA SCOUMOUNE, also starring Michel Constantin,and also concerning Corsicans. The director Daniel Vigne made a few films, and was not specialized in crime or mafia films. He was not Melville nor Jacques Deray, but his directing skills are impressive. A great French crime film from the seventies.

Michel Constantin and Marcel Bozzuffi, two of the tough guys of the French cinema. Here, in a dozen film, without much merit. The boring subject kind. You expect much more from them, but everything is disappointing.

The action takes place in the fifties and it's where the movie belongs for it is an anachronism:this story of gangsters ,which fills its quota of revenge and code of honor ,has been seen by the average French (?) viewer a hundred times or more .Good actors such as Michel Constantin and Marcel Bozzuffi do what they can and they are commendable considering the limitations they were working under.Henry Silva ,after some brilliant movies in his native America ("the Mandchourian candidate" "the Bravados" notably) left in the late sixties for France and Italy where we was invariably cast as the sinister-looking villain,the shady person (see Deray's awful "L" Marginal" ).

Daniel Vigne 's movies is not truly wretched ,it's an undistinguished work which unfortunately came too late:it was not even a big success in France ,a country who had to put up with the whole Melville filmography by then.