Rent Classe Tous Risques (1960)

Women and Children First - Classe Tous Risques review by CH

The geekish among us might know that Classe tous risques and Au bout de souffle appeared in the same year - 1960 - and even that both feature prolific newcomer Jean-Paul Belmondo; extreme geekdom vocalises their having appeared within a month of each other that late winter. The result was that Classe tous risques fell under the long, continuing shadow of its accomplice which was to be influential part of the New Wave.

Directed by Claude Sautet, Classe tous risques is also a tale of life on the run with many an urban scene, all bright sky, and troubled nights - both with voitures as curving as the women invited aboard them. Despite a speedboat and a motorcycle hoving into the lens as bullets splay, its pace becomes different, redolent of an earlier French style.

True, it has begun in Milan with a long-wanted criminal (Lino Ventura) on the run with an accomplice played by Stan Krol (who himself had met the author of the original novel, José Giovanni while in gaol). They make bold - rashly - to return to France where lurks Ventura’s former gangster milieu, some of them behind respectable façades.

So much for a familiar set-up. Also here, however, are Ventura’s two young children and their mother.

To fund this misbegotten journey, another heist is necessary. It can only go wrong, as it does, and have them sought out again. A matter of chases and roadblocks, death looms.

The children are spared, and the odyssey continues as the sirens fall ominously quiet while the film moves into a different, quasi-domestic gear. Ventura’s hopes of a safe passage are thwarted despite the Parisian mobsters’ despatch of Belmondo to help. In parallel with this, a romantic element is provided, not all together plausibly, by giving a lift to a hitchhiking stage aspirant (Sandra Milo).

Here is tremendous stuff. Even if so many wonderful scenes do not cohere, the film keeps one, shall we say, engagé as its Godard’s continues to do.