125 rue Montmartre

I enjoyed very much this black criminal story.

A newspaper vendor is envolved in a murder story and will fight for his innocence !

The dialogues written by Michel Audiard are very good.

Great performances of Lino Ventura, Dora Doll, Andréa Parisy , Robert Hirsch, Lucien Rambourg (the brother of Bourvil) and Pierre Desailly.

The chemistry between Lino Ventura and Robert Hirsch is great to watch. A great movie.

Gilles Grangier was never looked upon as an auteur and a lot of his sixties movies are really bad.But the fifties display a more interesting choice of movies:Bertrand Tavernier, a famous FRench director and a very demanding critic, admires "le sang à la tête " , "gasoil" and "le désordre et la nuit",the latter being probably his best work.

"125 rue Montmartre" ,more a Boileau-Narcejac("Diabolique" )detective story style than a true film noir,is quite entertaining ,and ,given the stranglehold the nouvelle vague began to have on the French cinema,it's almost a breath of fresh air.Although by no means a nouvelle vague movie,by a long shot (there were detective films among the nouvelle vague movies,"ascenseur pour l'échaffaud" is a prominent example,"a bout de soufflé" is another one),it shares with the young Turks a shooting on location,in the streets of Paris,with its bistros,its newspaper sellers and even its large impressive houses.

The first part introduces the leads:Ventura is a newspaper seller, a loud-mouth who does not stop talking,particularly when he's eating;Hirsh is his contrary: a nervous man,on the verge of madness ,who seems to be in jeopardy.His wife,he says ,tries to drive him insane to latch on to his valuable properties.But are thing really what they seems? Pretty soon,Ventura realizes he's framed.There's a very good supporting cast including Jean Desailly as an astute cop,Andréa Parisy,Dora Doll,and Alfred Adam.

The climax of the movie remains the scenes in the circus where suddenly Grangier stops his narration to focus on a clown act which segues into an impressive ending,which could make any B movie director proud.

Andréa Parisy is worth watching this movie. She's extremely beautiful, in my opinion. She always reminded me of Maria Callas, and a little of Audrey Hepburn.

Well, what about the movie? I like French movies as well as I like Italian ones. So I definitely am prejudiced. This one here is rather OK, not sooo really good. The story is rather poor, at least from a 2023's point of view. A naive guy (Lino Ventura) is trying to help a pseudo-psycho who actually is the lover of the rich man's wife. She murders her husband to get all of his money. Old story. However, the pictures of Paris in the late 1950s are great. And the rich man's wife is a feast for the eyes. Andréa Parisy is definitely one of the most beautiful ladies ever.

Just had the chance to watch this movie for the first time; before unknown to me. And I was fascinated! Great acting, a somewhat unusual Lino Ventura in great counter-acting with Robert Hirsch.

The plot captivating, and out of the ordinary.

The title makes little sense, neither in French nor in German. So, what one could well argue against this movie, is that it is unpolished. At times it looks like just improvised from a skeleton of story board.

A real climax is, when the presumed culprit goes to the circus and encounters exactly the person he is looking for. That's done extremely well, because the audience is steered towards recognizing the identity of the man who had disappeared.

The setting is well done, almost ancien régime, with a close to perfect film-noir-lighting.