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Few genres have been as reliable throughout the history of cinema as the prison break movie, from The Great Escape, to Escape from Alcatraz, to The Shawshank Redemption. Yet few have felt as authentic as Jacques Becker's Le Trou, translated in English as The Hole. Becker spared no expense in faithfully recreating the 1947 escape attempt at France's La Santé Prison, going so far as to cast one of the real inmates, Roland Barbat, to play himself. Barbat, appearing under the stage name Jean Keraudy, also served as a technical consultant, and he endorses the veracity of everything portrayed in a prologue, telling the audience, "This is my story." Becker's near-documentary approach lends newfound excitement to a tried-and-true genre, and influenced a generation of French filmmakers.

Praised for its realism and intensity, Jacques Becker’s 1960 prison break drama “Le Trou” is now bound for a pristine-looking 4K restoration, thanks to Rialto Pictures and Studio Canal. A nerve-wracking drama based on a true story, the film is adapted from the book “The Break” by ex-con José Giovanni and has been hailed as not just one of French cinema’s best films, but perhaps the best. (Lofty, we know.)

Based on a 1947 escape attempt enacted by five prisoners at France’s La Sante Prison, Becker used a slew of non-actors — including Jean Keraudy, who actually participated in the daring events the film portrays — to tell a gripping story that remains one of cinema’s most unnerving depictions of real-life drama.

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The film picks up after four prisoners and...

Mubi's series Jacques Becker's Companies is showing June 16 - July 18, 2017 in the United States.Le trouA striking thing about Jacques Becker, one of the last great classicists in French cinema, is the range of genres with which he was apparently at total ease. Astonishingly, the great critic and filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier recently said that Becker was maybe greater than Howard Hawks in this respect—a startling admission given that Hawks is an even more sacrosanct name for cinephiles of Tavernier’s age and predilection than his more obscure French contemporary. Becker, Tavernier said, had “an enormous range, and always [made films] with the same deeply organic quality.” Both Hawks and Becker are fascinated by genre, by the way that they can seemingly countermand inbuilt expectations by cultivating an atmosphere of life-like behavior that at least appears to undercut the revolving gears of plot. Both directors have come to be known as the makers of plotless movies,...