Les fanatiques

While hardly anything special, this is not too bad for a low-budget thriller. The plot is rather simple, but it gets enough out of the material to fill the running time without a lot of padding. The two leads (Pierre Fresnay and Michel Auclair) are solid enough.

The story starts with Fresnay and Auclair as two South American rebels who face some very difficult decisions in their struggle against their country's brutish dictator. The two leads are not especially sympathetic in any respect, and the rest of the characters are also too plain for it to get the most out of the suspense that it builds up. The production has no glaring weaknesses (aside from a couple of noticeably implausible developments), but it also has no significant strengths.

Yet it does deliver some real suspense for a time, and that is all that it tried to do. There were many similar movies made in subsequent eras, and even some of the ones with much bigger budgets did not really create that much more suspense than this one did.

Pierre Fresnay from Jean Renoir's "La Grande Illusion" (1937) and Henri-Georges Clouzot's "Le Corbeau" (1943), plays a serious, solid character. Michel Auclair, the one from "The Day of the Jackal" (1973) and some films with Alain Delon, also plays a solid, serious role. Very young and beautiful Françoise Fabian, in one of her first roles, plays a very convincing role of stewardess.

It was long before the seventies and the disaster movies craze.Like "the set-up" and "Cléo de 5 à 7", it's a movie in "real time".The first hour takes place at an airport,the last third on a plane .

The political background is simplistic :two "revolutionaries" want to get rid of a South America dictator.The older(Pierre Fresnay) wants to put a bomb in the plane ,the younger (Michel Auclair)is an idealist to whom the death of fifty innocents (the other passengers) is unbearable. It's an action-packed screenplay ,not devoid of implausibilities -a bubblehead girl agrees to take a stranger's suitcase with her on the plane!and why does Fresnay try to kill Auclair when he does the "job" properly?-,but which manages to sustain interest.The passengers include the cardboard characters who will be the trademark of the disaster movies:the energetic air hostess,the smart little boy,the romantic naive girl.

Alex Joffé is a very minor director.I do not think he's kin to Roland (Joffé)but I might be wrong.If I was mistaken,please,users,do correct me.