Le Soleil des voyous

Jean Gabin and Robert Stack. the "60's atmosphere. a decent story, predictable.caper story, with classic ingredients. friendship, business, gray guys and bad guys, a bank. nothing surprising. and, maybe, nothing serious. but it is one of films remembering a recipe. not in brilliant manner. but decent. and, in essence, that is the most significant thing.

Jean Gabin has three or four good businesses, he's married to beautiful authoress Suzanne Fion, he gets to slap around the waiter who tries to turn his restaurant into a cocaine pitch and he's bored. He plans a robbery of the bank across from his bar -- they've got a half-billion-franc payroll every month, like clockwork -- but doesn't really expect to do anything about it until his old buddy, Robert Stack shows up out of nowhere.

The movie has a beautiful set-piece robbery, Gabin slaps around several people and there is plenty of sadism and treachery, yet I found the movie to be good, but not the great fun I had expected. Perhaps I had gone in expecting too much, but Gabin is too old to play the virile action hero, so he's the brains of the operation, and Stack is the brawn. And Stack is never brutal or commanding or anything more than Gabin's efficient sidekick, his loyal dog, who has been looking for Gabin since he disappeared from Indo-China in 1954.

It's understandable, because it's Gabin, but it means that there's little depth to it. It's just a well-run caper film running along its clockwork mechanisms. that's a lot of fun, but nothing more.

An anachronism.The derivative screenplay is never exciting ,bearing more than a distant resemblance to Becker's "Touchez Pas Au Grisbi".(1954).Besides,Gabin is a restaurateur again ,like he was in Duvivier's classic "Voici Le Temps Des Assassins"(1956) where Lucienne Bogaert was one of the villains (she's here the evil gangster's ma).And one should add that Jean Delannoy ,who had been a talented director ,whatever the Nouvelle Vague's view on that matter,was in 1967 the ghost of himself.Casting Robert Stack was not really an injection of fresh blood in a hackneyed story .If the American actor was not dubbed ,hats off to the untouchable for his French is perfect.Robert Stack reportedly said he wanted to work with Truffaut and he had to make do with Delannoy.Suzanne Flon is wasted and Margaret Lee has no screen presence. This flick belongs to the fifties.

Nice movie, great acting from all the actors involved, good plot,