A Nightmare on Elm Street

A Nightmare on Elm Street
A Nightmare on Elm Street

Format: Cinema

Release date: 31 October 2013

Distributor: Park Circus

Director: Wes Craven

Writer: Wes Craven

Cast: Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp

USA 1984

91 mins

Released in 1984, A Nightmare on Elm Street was a wide-ranging critical and commercial success, establishing the faltering young studio New Line – nicknamed ‘The House that Freddy Built’ – and revitalising the career of writer/director Wes Craven, as well as introducing the cinema-going public to the enduring horror/comedy icons, Freddy Kreuger and Johnny Depp, who together must have inspired a significant demographic of fancy dress and Halloween costumes. Returning to the original film in the wake of the increasingly bizarre sequels, culminating in Wes Craven’s meta-mad New Nightmare and Samuel Bayer’s dourly unnecessary 2010 remake, I was surprised by how much fun it is. For some reason, I had retrospectively given the original film a patina of respectability in the light of the daftness of what was to come, but that daftness was right there from the beginning, and Nightmare is best enjoyed as a pulpy B-movie that sneakily delights in its own absurdity.

Although Robert Englund is credited in the opening titles as playing ‘Fred Krueger’, he really is Freddy from the get go. Forget any contemporary neuroses about the ubiquity of paedophilia; Freddy, the disfigured knife-clawed child murderer, is a cackling, malevolent clown figure who delights in the fear and disgust he causes his victims. His costume is circus-tent red and green, and in an early appearance, his arms stretch out from one side of the street to the other, both ludicrous and genuinely frightening. He’ll happily lop of a finger for a giggle, and his murders are gruesome jokes on his victims, involving peek-a-boo chases and Johnny Depp’s Greg getting sucked into the pit of his bed to be spewed out, like the gushing spill from the elevator in the Overlook Hotel. ‘You’re not gonna need a stretcher,’ a cop tells the rushing medics. ‘You’re gonna need a mop.’

Heather Langenkamp as Nancy, Freddie’s target and adversary, has a goofy awkward innocence and a weird dreamlike nonchalance. Everyone in the film behaves with an odd dreamy logic, though the dreams themselves are never really that dream-like, with the exception of the gooey staircases that melt under Nancy’s running feet. The dreams are more like Hollywood-digested Freud, with the boiler room as the steamy, ready-to-blow site of repression, rage and dark history, in stark opposition to the pastel-coloured suburban life on show. Freddy himself is a product of Nancy’s parents’ crimes, and they are as much a danger to her as Freddy, with Ronnee Blakley as Nancy’s booze-drenched mom and B-movie legend John Saxon as the absent police detective dad.

Ultimately, Nancy will try to inhabit Freddy’s sado-comic world and play by his rules. Anticipating the Home Alone antics of Macauley Culkin’s Kevin, Nancy improvises a series of Wile-E-Coyote traps – a hammer falling from a door, exploding lightbulbs – but these manoeuvres and her attempt at psychological release will be dubiously effective against a cartoonish figure who, like all cartoon heroes, simply won’t die.

John Bleasdale

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My Amityville Horror

My Amityville Horror

Format: DVD

Release date: 28 October 2013

Distributor: Arrow Films

Director: Eric Walter

Writer: Eric Walter

Cast: Daniel Lutz, Laura DiDio, Neme Alperstein

USA 2012

88 mins

This fine, puzzling documentary by Eric Walter consists largely of interviews with Daniel Lutz, who is, nowadays, a worker for the UPS, but who was, back in the 1970s, the oldest son of the Lutz family, who were at the heart of the ‘Amityville Horror’ paranormal case study/ media franchise. Walter gets to film Daniel playing guitar, riding around in hot rods, visiting a therapist and meeting up with various people who had a connection to the original case in some kind of quest to attain closure and peace.

The film lets everybody speak for themselves, with no editorial voice-over or evident bias, which is fair enough, though it does kind of assume that you’re familiar with the AH phenomenon, in which the Lutzes were supposed to have endured 28 days of supernatural assault after moving into a house that they picked up as a bargain after it had been the scene of a nasty mass murder (Daniel was 10 at the time). I, for one, could have done with a few more subtitles spelling out the facts where the facts are known. But this is a case where hard facts are hard to find. AH is a battleground between those who believe that it was all a hoax and those who believe the Lutzes’ account, with the waters further muddied by Jay Anson’s decidedly dodgy bestseller and the 1974 film, with its various sequels and remakes.

There are some great characters and strange ideas revealed along the way, and a visit to a psychic’s house (dozens of occult carvings, twin roosters crowing in cages, a piece of the ‘true cross’ revealed) that is weird comedy gold. But the main reason to watch My Amityville Horror is Daniel, clearly scarred by the dysfunctional home life that erupted into a media sensation. He fled home at 14 and is now estranged from his family, paranoid, intense and angry, and prone to making forceful statements that beg more questions than they answer. A brittle man in a macho shell, he recalls the subject of Errol Morris’s 2011 doc Tabloid, another film where the very idea of ‘truth’ becomes slippery and elusive. Did this stuff happen? Does Daniel need to believe it did? A film to argue over.

This review was first published as part of our LFF 2012 coverage.

Mark Stafford

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The Body

The co-writer of Julia’s Eyes (2010), Oriol Paulo, makes his feature debut with The Body, a claustrophobic thriller in which a corpse vanishes from its freezer in a morgue without a trace, the only witness being a guard left in a coma cause by indescribable fear. Released in the UK by Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment, The Body is out now on Blu-ray and DVD.

THE BODY PAGE 1
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Comic Strip Review by Neil Hood
More information on Neil Hood can be found here.

V/H/S/2

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V/H/S/2

Format: Cinema

Release date: 14 October 2013

Distributor: Koch Media

Directors: Adam Wingard, Gareth Evans, Jason Eisener, Eduardo Sánchez, Gregg Hale, Simon Barrett, Timo Tjahjanto

Cast: Adam Wingard, Lawrence Michael Levine, Kelsy Abbott

USA, Canada Indonesia 2013

96 mins

If the first V/H/S film was a tentative but flawed attempt to breathe some life into the well-worn anthology format by combining nostalgic longing and creepy storytelling, this second instalment represents a coming-of-age of the most over-the-top kind: like the unruly brother who bursts in the door at the most importunate moment, V/H/S/2 is loud, brash and brilliant.

V/H/S/2 is also released on DVD & VOD from 14 October 2013.

Veering from the sublime to the outrageous, V/H/S/2 is a terrific combination of talent and ambition. Most of the stories are not only technically impressive, but also combine terrifying scares with laugh-out loud moments. Without spoiling any of the storylines, suffice it say that the four segments vary from alien abductions to strange cults, with eye transplants and zombies in between. Standout segments from Gareth Evans and Jason Eisener impress and astonish in equal measure, however, the talents of other directors (especially Adam Wingard’s tender Carpenter tribute) must not be ignored. V/H/S/2 is an engaging, brilliant sequel, which deserves a huge audience to enjoy it loud and big at the cinema – an almost perfect Saturday evening film.

This review was first published as part of our FrightFest 2013 coverage.

Evrim Ersoy

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Squirm

Squirm
Squirm

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 23 September 2013

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Jeff Lieberman

Writer: Jeff Lieberman

Cast: Don Scardino, Patricia Pearcy, R.A. Dow

USA 1976

93 mins

During a thunderstorm in 1970s’ rural America, a fallen pylon sends millions of volts into wet mud. Thousands of particularly gruesome fanged and multi-legged worms are charged with a desire to devour human flesh, coming out at night to attack the inhabitants of smalltown Fly Creek in Georgia. Not suprisingly, the electric storm coincides with the arrival of Mick (Don Scardino), who has come from New York to woo local belle Geri Sanders (Patricia Pearcy). Mick epitomises all tourists, associated with pollution and the nasty stuff they leave in the water, and causes frowns all around when he asks for his fancy ‘egg cream’ in the local caf. The two lovers, who did not factor in an attack of killer invertebrates during their romantic break, are the focus for Jeff Lieberman’s film. When people start to die in the town Mark and Geri set out to find out why, but are Mark’s quick-witted city ways a match for the wired worms?

Jeff Lieberman’s debut Squirm (1976) is well aware of its ludicrous premise, although as ‘ecological parable’ the film may have resonance for audiences in light of a new wave of climate-change horror. The release of the film certainly coincides with a turn to authenticity in current genre cinema. I’m thinking of recent homage films that show a reverence for celluloid over data, physical special effects and everything analogue, for example, Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) and Berberian Sound Studio (2012). The revenge of nature, or at least the physical, is now staged in the modes of production and materials used to make films.

One of the gems on Arrow’s Blu-ray release is the inclusion of the Q&A with Lieberman and Scardino from New York’s Anthology Archives (2012). Their stories about the pre-CGI production are as much a part of revisiting the film now as watching it. Highlights include how make-up artist Rick Baker produced some ground-breaking prosthetics for the shoot, as well as how the all-star wriggling cast of 250,000 worms were rounded up and made to wiggle on cue – animal lovers turn away at this point to avoid authenticity overload. Lieberman also reveals how sets and reverse printing were used in some scenes to create a particular creepy effect. Squirm is put together with visual eccentricities throughout, and part of this is the creation of some eerie, off-kilter shots.

My favourite is a story about the resurfacing of a sound effect that originally featured in Carrie, also made in 1976. When Lieberman was searching for a sound for the worms’ hideous screeching, Squirm sound editor Dan Sable, who had just been working on Carrie, played him a chilling recording of the scream of a pig being slaughtered (it’s enough here just to mention pig’s blood and prom dance). Lieberman thought this was the ideal sound for his rabid swarm, and ultimately it features heavily in the film. It’s interesting to hear that iconic sound effects enjoy this kind of covert resurrection.The resurfacing of the real is what gives the film its uncanny draw, and is as enjoyable now in its HiDef regalia as it was in its grindhouse, scratched up, celluloid form.

Nicola Woodham

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The Wicker Man: The Final Cut

The Wicker Man Final Cut
The Wicker Man: The Final Cut

Format: Cinema

Release date: 27 September 2013

Distributor: Studiocanal UK

Director: Robin Hardy

Writer: Anthony Schaffer

Cast: Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Diane Cilento, Britt Ekland

UK 1975

84 mins

So here it is again, resurfacing once more, this time in a handsome restoration, apparently the most complete version there is ever likely to be*, after a 40-odd year journey from cult oddity to classic status. In 1972, Robin Hardy’s film was very much the bottom half of a double bill with Don’t Look Now (there’s a night at the movies!). Heavily edited and under-ballyhooed, The Wicker Man seemed destined to sink without trace. Later, after decades of late night viewings, Hardy’s film began to be seen, together with the messy, oddly beguiling Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971), as being in the vanguard of a British sub-genre that never blossomed, a road not taken – call it the folk horror film, or horror pastoral. Today, that sub-genre seems to be on the up again, at least for as long as Ben Wheatley’s got anything to do with it, and so it’s a good time for The Wicker Man to be back on our screens.

If you haven’t encountered the film before, it goes like this: Edward Woodward plays Police Sergeant Howie, a devout Christian officer, tasked with flying to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl, Rowan Morrison. Upon arriving at Summerisle, however, he finds his efforts frustrated by the locals, who variously deny that the girl is missing, or that she existed at all. As he tries to find out what lies behind these contradictions, he is appalled to discover that he is surrounded by practising pagans, whose belief system has held sway over the island since the 19th century, and is currently overseen by Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee). The fields are filled with copulating couples, the schoolchildren are being taught about phallic symbols, and the whole island seems transfixed by a cult of fertility, except, as he discovers, the previous year the crops disastrously failed. Could the islanders be planning to sacrifice Rowan to appease their gods? As the May Day festivities approach, and with no help coming from any quarter, Sergeant Howie desperately resolves to find, and rescue, the girl.

The restored ‘Final Cut’ version of The Wicker Man is released on Blu-ray/DVD in the UK by Studiocanal Home Entertainment on 14 October.

If the presence of Christopher Lee and Ingid Pitt, who pops up as a librarian, suggest links with the Hammer tradition, The Wicker Man largely plays against them. Lee, here, gives a much more nuanced and playful performance than he was generally required to deliver in a cape. The film is contemporary rather than period, location shot rather than studio bound, and benefits hugely from found imagery and the use of non-pro actors. It builds a sense of nightmare from an accumulation of creepy details, mostly seen in broad daylight, and a ripe vein of folk weirdness that seems miles away from Hammer’s dusty castles. And moreover, it is, oddly enough, a musical of sorts: besides the incidental score by Magnet, we have the locals in the Green Man bursting into Paul Giovanni’s largely saucy numbers at the drop of a hat, and maypole dancers and fire leapers accompanied by catchy little ditties (the song ‘Gently Johnny’ has been restored for this version, sung, distractingly enough, by a Neil Gaiman lookalike). This is before the landlord’s daughter and island’s Aphrodite, Willow (Britt Ekland, and body double) has her finest screen moment, tunefully testing Woodward’s faith by writhing naked against his door. This kind of thing didn’t happen in your average Amicus production (more’s the pity…) While its influence has grown over the years, The Wicker Man still has the feel of a film apart, an island detached from the mainstream.

‘Only as a comparative religion’ is schoolteacher Miss Rose’s (Diane Cilentro) blithe reply when asked if she teaches Christianity in her classes. And that’s very much the name of the game here, as Howie’s dutiful, establishment religion is repeatedly contrasted with the shag-happy islander’s unorthodox beliefs. However, Anthony Schaffer’s** script plays sly games with our sympathies. A young audience in post-hippy 1972 would be expected to find much to like about Summerisle’s horny paganism, and a lot of fun is had at Howie’s expense as he boggles at the rampant sexuality and freaky-folky business on display. In this cut, we see him in church at the outset, singing hymns and taking communion, and these images recur later on, the church rituals looking cold and empty against the pagan rites, with their animal eroticism. For much of the film he looks a bit of a fool, especially when resisting the advances of Willow, trembling in his brown pyjamas. But… slowly our sympathies turn; the locals may be colourful, but they’re also evasive, mocking and increasingly sinister. Howie may be a humourless, self-righteous stiff but, largely thanks to Woodward’s performance, he’s also human, and admirably driven, on the side of the angels. At the climax of the film, the islanders swaying rendition of ‘Summer Is Icumen In’ seems brainwashed and deranged, while Howie’s ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’, by contrast, has some kind of powerful dignity. Take your pick, you heathens!

*If you’re curious, the ‘Final Cut’ is the version Hardy assembled for distributors Abraxas in 1979, now cleaned up and looking decidedly spiffy. For those only familiar with the short version, this means a little restructuring, plus a brief bit of Howie on the mainland, the song ‘Gently Johnny’ as mentioned above, and a sequence introducing a kilt-wearing Lord Summerisle on Howie’s first night on the island. For my money this scene telegraphs the rest of the movie a little too much, but hey, it’s nice to see it.

** Incidentally, the title credit actually reads ‘Anthony Schaffer’s The Wicker Man’. Offhand, I can’t think of any other film that credits the screenwriter this way. Odd. And well deserved.

Mark Stafford

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Deadlock

Deadlock
Deadlock

Format: DVD

Release date: 26 September 2005

Distributor: Filmgalerie 451

Director: Roland Klick

Writer: Roland Klick

Cast: Mario Adorf, Marquard Bohm, Anthony Dawson, Mascha Elm Rabben, Sigurd Fitzek, Betty Segal

West Germany 1970

85 mins

A young man named Kid, in a dusty two-piece suit and with a bullet wound in his arm, walks across an astoundingly stark and shimmering desert carrying a metal suitcase and a machine gun. After collapsing from exhaustion, his body is eventually discovered by Mr. Dump who opens the suitcase to find a vinyl 45-inch single and a pile of stolen money. His initial plan is to take the money and run, until Kid gains consciousness and forces Mr. Dump at gunpoint to take him with him and remove the bullet from his arm.

Mr. Dump reluctantly drives them back to his refuge, a desolate and squalid mining town whose only other occupants are Mr. Dump’s deranged and psychotic wife and their mute, feral daughter. Refusing to remove the bullet from Kid’s arm, a power struggle between the two men ensues as Mr. Dump desperately tries to exploit the situation for his own means. That is until the mysterious Mr. Sunshine arrives to split the cash and settle old scores. As night turns into day, the situation increasingly escalates towards unhinged paranoia and extreme violence, with any chance of hope obscured by blood, dust and the intrusion of bleak reality.

Although Roland Klick’s Deadlock (1970) may have taken its cue from Spaghetti Westerns and classic American crime movies, it’s also fair to say – like the best cult movies of the 1970s – that it takes place within a universe of its own making. Much like Kaneto Shindō’s Onibaba (1964), its small cast of tormented and tormenting characters never leave the confines of their isolated location, with very little indication of an outside world. It’s almost as if a group of classic archetypes have broken free from their own movies and found themselves lost within the last film at the edge of the earth.

Klick uses the sparse surroundings of Israel’s Negev desert to great effect, creating a crumbling portrait of arid decay and brutal, unforgiving desperation. His inventive framing and overtly stylistic compositions give the film a dreamlike quality – with the occasional moment of controlled psychedelic surrealism – without bubbling over into nonsensical self-indulgence. Add to this the superb film score by Krautrock legends Can and you’ve got yourself an incredibly unique and unforgettable piece of German cinema. In fact, the way in which Klick lets the Can track ‘Tango Whiskey Man’ slowly imbed itself into the narrative (it’s the single hidden in the suitcase with the money) is one of the clever touches that gives the film a certain charm.

Despite Klick’s ambitious experimentalism, he never gets sidetracked and thankfully refuses to neglect certain genre expectations, with a plot and place that’s as firm and gritty as the landscape on which it takes place. A thrilling, entertaining and distinctive example of B-movie pragmatism delivered with artistic scope.

Robert Makin

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Sleepwalker

Sleepwalker
Sleepwalker

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 23 September 2013

Distributor: BFI

Director: Saxon Logan

Writer: Saxon Logan

Cast: Heather Page, Bill Douglas, Joanna David, Nickolas Grace

UK 1984

50 mins

It’s 1984, and somewhere in England there is a rain-lashed, crumbling house called Albion where the Britains live. Marion (Heather Page) and Alex (Bill Douglas) are a pair of siblings whose already fractious relationship is clearly tested further by the power cuts, leakages and broken windows inflicted on their inherited property. They are visited by the Paradises, Angela (Joanna David) and Richard (Nickolas Grace); he’s an utterly appalling yuppie type given to cracking AIDS gags, she’s a bit of a doormat enduring his hot-and-cold running abuse. Richard and the ineffectual, leftish Alex take an instant dislike to each other and so follows an excruciating drunken evening of unbridled hostility and resentment, with Marion taking the opportunity to aim various digs at her brother (‘he’s not a writer, he’s a translator… writers have style’), also revealing that he once tried to strangle her in his sleep. After an uncomfortable meal at a restaurant, the quartet return to Albion where relations deteriorate further. They all go to bed. And then things get nasty…

Saxon Logan’s Sleepwalker (1984) is genuinely odd, and remains so after repeat viewings. A 50-minute-long state of the nation, four-hander play whose genes have been spliced with a stylised giallo slasher. It’s full of overt symbology, the characters are clearly archetypes, the performances are exaggerated, and given this, one might expect Sleepwalker to hit its viewers over the head with a well telegraphed message, but it’s a bit slippier than that. The doomy synth chords and Bava/Argento gel shots (and blimey, there’s a lot of blue here) suggest one type of cinema; the intricate emotional dynamics, political wrangling and oneiric imagery suggest another. The result is disquieting and elusive. A card at the end of the credits reads ‘this film is dedicated to imperfect cinema’, which seems accurate. There’s something not quite right about Sleepwalker, which, as I write this, makes me want to see it again

The BFI disc of Saxon Logan’s film is part of its Flipside line, a treasure trove of vintage British weirdness. It comes with a lengthy, and ultimately moving, interview with the director, plus the two short films he made before Sleepwalker, which are witty and visually inventive, and suggest, once again, that Britain tends to squander and ignore its singular talents. Logan had the good fortune to work as Lindsay Anderson’s assistant on O Lucky Man!, and the bad luck to emerge as a filmmaker just as the UK industry entered one of its most barren and moribund phases. He recounts in the interview a painful screening of Sleepwalker for Rank distribution executives, in which his film, which had been received with enthusiasm and a Special Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, was met with disapproving bafflement. He moved into documentaries. And it looks like we missed out on some idiosyncratic cinema.

Also on the disc is Rodney Giesler’s The Insomniac, a delightful 45-minute curiosity from 1971, wherein an everyday working stiff (Morris Perry) achieves a kind of freedom in a sunlit, nocturnal dreamworld, including some X-certificate loving with Carry On starlet Valerie Van Ost, before reality rears its ugly head. Great stuff.

Mark Stafford

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt

Format: Cinema

Release date: 27 September 2013

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Margarethe von Trotta

Writers: Margarethe von Trotta, Pam Katz

Cast: Barbara Sukowa, Janet McTeer, Klaus Pohl, Julia Jentsch, Ulrich Noethen, Axel Milberg

Germany, Luxembourg, France 2012

113 mins

Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt is not a documentary, but a dramatisation of the best-known episode in the life of the German-American political theorist. In 1961, while she was a professor at the New School in New York, Arendt went to Jerusalem to report, for the New Yorker, on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, following his abduction from Argentina by Mossad. Wary of the judicial process, suspicious of the Israeli government, Arendt refused to prejudge Eichmann. And perhaps she allowed herself to take her contrariety too far.

First, she seemed to go too far towards exculpation of Eichmann, in order to put across her big idea about the banality of evil. We have now all become used to this idea as part of the landscape of cruelty and suffering: in the modern world monstrous things are not usually done by monsters, but by ordinary people. But the dramatic crux of the film is Arendt’s even more controversial criticism of Jewish leaders under Nazi rule, which she took far enough to look like blame.

So she blamed her fellow Jews and exculpated the Nazi – er, maybe you’ve overthought that one a bit, Professor Arendt? Was this stubborn devotion to truth, or was she carried away with her own ideas?

There are some flashbacks to her youthful engagement (philosophical and physical) with Heidegger, the Nazi-in-waiting, and some other mildly awkward episodes in her personal life. Dialogue is spoken in the actual languages supposed to have been used by the people portrayed: mainly German, with interludes in English, while archive film is incorporated, surprisingly smoothly. This portrait of an intellectual woman is handled more calmly and seriously by von Trotta than one can imagine it would be by a British filmmaker. Glamourisation, conjecture, pathos, symbolism, and messages are eschewed.

Arendt is let off lightly, but I guess it’s tempting to side with her when the alternative might look like siding with the Israeli government and the people who tried to hound her out of her job. Not really an edifying episode in intellectual history, but an interesting story told with appropriate restraint.

Peter Momtchiloff

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Classe tous risques

Classe tous risques
Classe tous risques

Format: Cinema

Release date: 13 September 2013

Distributor: BFI

Director: Claude Sautet

Writers: Claude Sautet, Pascal Jardin

Based on the novel by: José Giovanni

Cast: Lino Ventura, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Sandra Milo, Marcel Dalio

France 1960

110 mins

A train station in Italy. Two small children receive a furtive send off before boarding a train alone with their mother. Their father, a fugitive gangster, has decided that it’s time for the family to return home to France after ten years in hiding, but to finance the move, Abel Davos (Lino Ventura) needs to pull off one last job, a brazen theft in broad daylight in Milan. Of course, that theft only increases the unwanted attention from the police, and Davos’s flight to the border, and eventually to Paris, is a dramatic, dangerous and ultimately tragic grasp at freedom, which underpins Claude Sautet’s fantastic thriller about a once-powerful man now struggling for his survival.

Based on a novel by José Giovanni, written after the author’s release from jail, Classe tous risques (Consider all Risks) gets off to a dynamic start, with Davos’s getaway from Milan relayed in a terrific action sequence, involving cars, motorbikes and a boat landing on the French shore under the cover of night. But when the worst happens, Davos finds he must turn to his former partners-in-crime for help. His ‘friends’ in Paris now live more respectable lives, safe only because he took the fall for their misdeeds in the past, culminating in his exile. But now, years later, they are reluctant to pay their debts. Instead of becoming personally involved, they send Eric Starck, a young man-on-the-make (played by a terrific Jean-Paul Belmondo) to pick up Davos in the south of France and bring him back to Paris.

Davos, who should be more concerned with the welfare of his family, is quietly furious and turns to plotting his revenge, seeking payback for this latest betrayal – with the help of Eric, who goes above and beyond the call of duty to protect Davos and his children. From this point on, despite clear indications of the brutality that lurks below the gangster’s charismatic exterior, Sautet sets up a blend of moral ambiguities and dilemmas, making it almost impossible not to empathise with Davos – even if his actions can’t be condoned.

Classe tous risques is released in the UK as a BFI Dual Format (DVD/Blu-ray) edition on 24 February 2014.

Classe tous risques is a taut, original gangster film told with simplicity and a compelling directness, with bare-bones exposition and a neorealist touch. But there are also deeper, more thoughtful issues in play with Sautet’s no-punches-pulled exploration of the conflicts between loyalty and family, and the code of honour among thieves. The result is a tour de force, which is rounded out by a soundtrack by Georges Delerue and beautifully composed cinematography from Ghislain Cloquet. In one memorable shot, a woman that Davos and Eric encounter, having only just realised that she might be in the company of criminals, is caught between Eric in the background, while in the foreground, a telephone – a link to the cops – is separated from her by a pane of glass. Her moment of hesitation as she decides between right and wrong is exquisite.

It’s only a shame that Classe tous risques was utterly eclipsed on its original release by Belmondo’s other film, Breathless, coming out in the same year, and the ensuing excitement over the French New Wave. But the real mystery lies in why Sautet rarely returned to the underworld of gangsters and criminals during his career, choosing instead to focus on dramas set in the world of the bourgeoisie – films which, admittedly, brought him more success than this overlooked, but rich contribution to the genre.

Sarah Cronin

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